


Mage and Templar

by sheepishwolfy



Series: Paper Birds [1]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-15
Updated: 2016-11-25
Packaged: 2018-03-07 16:51:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 24,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3177330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheepishwolfy/pseuds/sheepishwolfy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before he was commander of the Inquisition's forces, he was just a another initiate. Before she was the Hero of Ferelden, she was just another  apprentice. And Varric is determined to get the tale of how mage met templar.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Two glasses and a bottle of what appeared to be West Hill brandy appeared on the desk, followed shortly by the scraping of a chair across the stone floor. The commander flicked his eyes upward only long enough to note the dwarf now seating himself opposite the desk.

“Something I can do for you, Varric?” Cullen asked, turning his eyes back to his reports.

“Are you aware there is a massive hole in your ceiling?” Varric replied, uncorking the bottle and pouring several fingers-- practically a whole fist-- of brandy into each glass.

“Yes, quite. Not a single person has entered the room without commenting on it.” He frowned as he continued to write, gesturing to the glasses with his quill between sentences. “Was the tavern full?”

“No, but between Bull and his chargers it may as well be,” Varric said, chuckling. With one thick finger he pushed a glass carefully towards the commander, then picked up his own. He slowly swirled the brandy, and fixed Cullen with a level stare. “So tell me about the Hero of Ferelden.”

The tip of the quill snapped as it scratched harshly across the width of the parchment with the sudden jerk of his hand. Cullen stared deerlike at the jagged line and thick splatter of ink now ruining his report. Eventually he cleared his throat and carefully set aside the broken quill. “Excuse me?”

“You knew her before she was the Hero,” Varric explained.

“Briefly, a very long time ago,” Cullen said curtly.

“You served in the Calenhad circle, where she lived before being conscripted to the Wardens. Surely you must have something to say about her.” Varric couldn't help but grin at the former templar's obviously growing annoyance.

“Varric, if you're writing another book I hardly see how anything I have to say will be of any use,” Cullen said, yanking open a desk drawer and hunting for a fresh pen. “So if you would excuse me--”

“Oh, I'm not writing a book about the Blight,” Varric interjected. “Or I wasn't, though it would be a great setting... Anyway, no, that's not why I'm here. We were hoping you might have some kind of insight on where to find her.”

“And what in the Maker's name gave you that idea?” Cullen demanded. He plucked a small paring knife from the desk and with quick, irritated motions set to sharpening the tip of his new quill.

“Leliana,” Varric said. “She was, as I'm sure you know, one of the Warden's companions during the Blight.”

“Then go bloody talk to her.”

“She and the Seeker have been hunting the Warden for at least as long as they were hunting Hawke. Whatever knowledge our Spymaster has, it isn't enough.” Varric paused and took a sip of his brandy. “But you knew her when she was an apprentice. Maybe something you have will give us a clue.”

Cullen sighed. “Trust me when I tell you that nothing I have to say will do you any good. It's been twelve-- no, thirteen?-- years since I had anything to do with her.”

“Look, Curly, I'm doing you a favor by coming here myself. When Cassandra heard you were ever even in the same room with the Warden, she wanted to come over here and rake you over the coals herself. Trust me when I tell you that's not something you want to happen.”

The commander stared across the desk, jaw set, for a long moment.

“I can go get her, though, if you would rather--”

“Maker, no,” Cullen said quickly, defeated. He sighed again, laying quill and knife at the edge of the desk. His papers he gathered quickly, carefully together and stacked them out of the way. With one hand he pulled the other glass of brandy towards himself, certain he would need it if he was to spend the rest of the evening talking about the Circle, let alone about her. He took a sip, letting the alcohol burn a path down his throat before speaking again. “What is it you want to know, exactly?”

“Anything you have to tell. What was she like? Where would she have gone, if you had to guess?” Varric asked.

Cullen sat back in his chair, thinking for a moment. “Lyanna was--”

“Lyanna? That's awfully familiar for someone who only knew her 'briefly',” Varric said, eyeing the commander over his drink.

“At the circle she was just Lyanna,” Cullen said tersely, frowning. “Apprentices didn't have titles.”

“Apologies, messere, for the interruption,” Varric said, lifting his free hand. “Carry on.”

Taking another drink, Cullen continued. “She was top of her class. I recall her studying late into the evenings in the libraries. Not even necessarily because she had to, but because she enjoyed it. The reading, the theory. She probably read every book in the tower twice. And if she wasn't in the library, she was in the greenhouse. I think she must have loved plants as much as she loved books, and knew the name and use of every herb and flower you could think of.”

He ran his finger around the rim of the glass, gazing almost absently into the amber liquid as old memories returned to him fresh as though it had been yesterday. Varric kept quiet, though he made note of a certain wistfulness creeping into the normally reserved commander's voice.

“She was a very talented healer,” he said. “She was apprenticed directly to the Senior Enchanter who ran the tower's infirmary, but even as an apprentice she made better poultices and salves than Wynne herself did. My guess is Lyanna would have eventually become First Enchanter, if she had remained at the tower. Provided she..” Cullen caught himself before he said survived Uldred's uprising, swallowing the words and hoping Varric didn't press for an explanation.

“Above all,” he said instead, “above all, she was kind. To children on their first nights in the tower, to stiff old enchanters, even... even to the templars. She had a kind word and a gentle hand for everyone.”

Unable to help himself, Varric smirked and added, “And I suppose the first time you met, she was the most beautiful thing you had ever lain your young eyes upon.”

To his surprise, Cullen didn't glare or snap. He tapped his fingers on the desk, and a small smile brushed his lips. “No, she wasn't, actually. She was... probably all of fourteen. Skinny, taller than half the apprentices her age. Tall as I was, in truth. All knees and elbows. Eyes too big for her face. Not to say I was any better. I was sixteen, fresh from the farm, certain I was going to spend my life being a hero and hunting apostates in the name of Andraste.”

“I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you knew her better than you let on,” Varric said, carefully, hoping to keep the commander talking.

Cullen let out a long, slow breath, and nodded. “I... yes,” he said. “Though I highly doubt anything that happened then will be of any help to Cassandra.”

“Let's let her be the judge of that,” Varric suggested. “Why don't you just start from the beginning, and we'll go from there.”

“We didn't speak to one another for... three, maybe four years after my arrival. She was just another apprentice in a sea of them and I was preoccupied with my training. Apprentices and initiates rarely, if ever, have reason to talk.”

“But..?” Varric prompted.

Cullen inclined his head towards the dwarf and smiled again, that same small, faintly wistful smile. “But sometimes, they do have reason. And that day, we did.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little bit gory, but nothing too bad.

The sun beat hard on him, heating the steel prison of his armor. Sweat ran into his eyes, plastered his hair to his temples, coursed in thin rivulets down his neck. His breath was impossibly loud inside his helmet, drowning out the thump and clatter of weapons practice continuing around him. He couldn't feel his left arm below the elbow.

Blinking against the sunlight burning through his visor, Templar initiate Cullen attempted to sit up. His right arm alone barely managed to push his weight up, and he shook his head once to clear it. Nearby, Cullen's sparring partner stood totally still, staring, eyes wide enough for the whites to be visible through the slit in her visor. Around them, he realized, the practice yard had gone silent.

“Maker's breath, Cullen, I'm sorry!” she exclaimed.

The armsmaster, Knight-Captain Bran, appeared. “Don't just stand there, initiate, fetch a healer!” he snapped, then bent and plucked something off the ground. He knelt, gesturing with the object-- a sun-bleached shard of wood-- at Cullen's face. “Son, this right here is why we pay attention to our equipment.”

It was, Cullen realized, a piece of a shield. What had been _his_ shield, before it split beneath the weight of an over-handed blow, shattering like so much glass. He'd picked it not even an hour ago from a selection of what he'd thought were identical ones, assuming one slab of wood and steel was as good as the next.

Clearly, he had been wrong.

“Can you stand?” Bran asked, straightening.

“Yes,” Cullen replied, looking down to push himself to his feet.

He stopped immediately and stared, uncomprehending, at his left arm. There was a dent in the gauntlet where his forearm should have been, bending his hand away at an impossibly sharp angle. He blinked several times, attempted to wiggle his fingers. Blood began to seep thickly from the edge of his glove.

“Oh,” he said, blinking again.

Then another, almost involuntary. “Oh.”

The third “oh” stretched out into a long exhalation, pitched too low for a whine but too high for a true groan. His stomach lurched, his head felt as though it might float away, and his vision narrowed to a pinpoint focused on the drops of his own blood falling to the dusty ground. Then he was falling to the dusty ground, his helmet ringing against the hard-packed earth.

“Maker's tangled beard, get him to the shade.” Bran's voice sounded distant, like he was yelling down a long corridor. Two pairs of hands seized Cullen by the armpits and the ankles and lifted him. He was dimly aware that he was still making the same sound, the same not-whine-not-groan.

“And get that bloody helmet off him before he pukes in it!”

\---

When Cullen opened his eyes he was lying on the ground again, now in the shade, the Circle tower looming over him. His helmet was off, and someone was pressing a cool, damp cloth to his forehead. A delicate wrist passed through his line of sight, and he followed the length of a slender arm to a shoulder, up a swanlike neck to a narrow face framed by long, rail-straight black hair. She wasn't looking at him, her attention instead on two people arguing a few paces away.

“You should have brought him to the infirmary,” snapped a woman's voice. Senior Enchanter Wynne, if he had to hazard a guess from the sharp tone alone. “It's ridiculous, leaving him in the dirt like that!”

“Do you have any idea how heavy a boy his size is, in full plate? If I'd had him carried him up four flights of stairs, you'd have _three_ to heal about instead of one!” came the reply. Knight-Captain Bran.

“Instead you left him bleeding on the ground,” said Wynne, exasperated.

The girl, likely an apprentice, glanced briefly at him. Her attention returned immediately when she realized he was awake. “Senior Enchanter,” she called over her shoulder. To him she said, “I'm Lyanna Amell.”

“Uh... Cullen,” he replied.

“Well, it's nice to meet you,” she said, and smiled. She had the sweetest smile he had ever seen, and the bluest eyes. Like the summer sky just before dusk, nearly indigo.

Behind them, the Senior Enchanter and the Knight-Captain stalled their argument long enough to notice Cullen had come to. Bran squatted at his side, opposite Lyanna. Wynne remained standing, arms crossed.

“Good, you're awake,” Wynne said. “We stopped your bleeding for the most part, but I wanted you conscious before we did much more. Would you allow my apprentice to care for you?”

“Andraste's sake, woman, you want to trust him to an apprentice?” Bran protested.

“I asked the boy,” she replied sharply, shooting the Knight-Captain a withering look.

* * *

 

“I find it hard to believe a lifelong circle mage would talk to a templar like that.”

Cullen merely shrugged at Varric's skepticism. “Not all circles were like Kirkwall,” he said. “In fact, looking back on it, I'd say most circles weren't at all like Kirkwall. There was, in Kinloch Hold at least, a... respect, I guess, between the mages and templars. We didn't keep bootheels to backs of their necks.”

“That didn't sound much like respect to me,” Varric said.

“You didn't know Wynne,” Cullen laughed. “Or Bran, for that matter. He was stubborn and ill-tempered as an old mule, and she didn't take shit from anyone. _Anyone_. I once watched her cow the Knight-Commander himself into letting her leave the tower without any sort of templar escort.”

“She sounds terrifying.”

“She was,” the commander agreed. “I always liked her, though.”

* * *

 

“I asked the boy,” Wynne snapped. In a gentler tone, she addressed Cullen again. “I'll be standing right here, watching, but this is a rare opportunity for an apprentice. So, is it alright if she handles your care?”

“I... Uh, sure?” Lying on the ground as he was, he couldn't exactly argue either way.

Beside him, Bran threw his hands up, and stood. “Madness,” he muttered. “Good luck, initiate.”

Wynne rolled her eyes and shook her head, then motioned to her apprentice. “Well, go ahead.”

“Oh, um... alright,” Lyanna said, seemingly surprised. She shook it off quickly, though, and when she turned back to him she was all business.

“You've broken your arm in at least one place,” she informed him. As she spoke, she reached behind her head to tie back her hair, twisting it quickly around her finger and knotting it with a thin leather cord. It was, he noted, the blue-black of a raven's feathers. When she finished, she gently lifted his still-numb, still-gauntleted, still-nauseatingly-bent arm into her lap.“There's a pretty strong possibility it's an open fracture. I can't be sure until I get your glove off, though.”

“Okay. It... it doesn't hurt, though.” It couldn't be that bad, he thought, if it still didn't hurt much.

She winced, and cast him a sympathetic look. “It will.”

With quick, careful motions she undid the straps holding the steel gauntlet to the leather glove beneath, lifting it away and setting it aside. Faced with the glove, bulging around the horrifying mystery of his broken arm, she paused again.

“That's not coming off easily,” she murmured, mostly to herself, and reached into a satchel resting next to her. Lyanna drew out a set of sewing shears and set to slowly, _slowly_ cutting through the leather.

After what must have been hours-- but was likely just a few minutes-- she dropped the shears back into the bag. “Moment of truth,” she said. Cullen could feel that the inside of the glove was sticky, probably with his own blood, and despite his better judgment lifted his head to watch Lyanna work.

He instantly regretted it, as he realized that she was peeling the glove away from exposed bone. His bone. His actual bone, jagged and gleaming white in the indirect sunlight, protruding garishly through the flesh of his arm.

“Oh,” he said, again, and dropped his head back to the ground.

“Sorry,” Lyanna said, and glanced up. 'Does it hurt?”

“No.” Pain lanced up his arm, searing from his mangled wrist to his shoulder. “Yes,” he amended.

He felt one of her hands wrap around his elbow, the other curling around his now-bare fingers. There was the quiet hum of magic, making the hair the back of his neck stand up. Warmth spread between the two points, and the pain dulled from white-hot to tepid. Still present, but bearable. He was able to concentrate on her voice when she spoke again.

“You have two options,” she said, sitting back. “I can heal you completely, and you can be back in the yard tomorrow. Or, I can do just enough to push the bone back into place, close the skin over it, but let your body heal the rest of the way itself. Faster than just letting you heal on your own, but you'll still need a week or two to get totally back to normal.”

“And why would he bloody want the second choice?” Bran demanded. “Get on with it, apprentice, heal him up and let's be on our way.”

Lyanna met the Knight-Captain's gaze with all the cool confidence of a full-fledged Enchanter. “It's _always_ best to let the body do as much as it can on its own,” she explained, just on the edge of condescending; clearly she was Wynne's apprentice in more than just magic. “The bone knits together slower, but it's stronger than if we just force it back into place entirely by magic. I can have him in working order by the end of the afternoon, but he's more likely to just break it again in the same place sometime in the future.”

Bran stared at her for a long time, unsure how to respond to a lecture from an apprentice. “Fair enough,” he said finally. “Let him decide.”

Lyanna looked back to Cullen, but before she could ask he blurted, “I never want to do this again.”

“Slowly it is,” she said. She shifted slightly, adjusting the position of his arm over her knees.

Again he lifted his head to watch her, unable to stop himself. The motions of her hands, graceful yet precise, were entrancing. Her fingers, slender against the broad expanse of his wrist, were soft and warm. The heel of her opposite palm came to rest over his forearm, just barely touching the exposed bone. Blood stained the back of her hand, dark against her pale skin. Delicate knuckles--

* * *

 

“You know, at this point, I feel like I can picture her hands better than her face,” Varric mused.

Cullen cleared his throat and looked away, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. Spots of color appeared high on his cheeks. “I don't...” he began to protest, but stopped with a sigh. “She had the most lovely hands,” he said instead.

“As would befit a healer, I suppose,” the dwarf said, smirking.

* * *

 

Lyanna placed her hands on his broken arm, and took a deep breath. Her eyes darted up to meet his, and she smiled apologetically. “This is probably going to hurt,” she said, the sympathy in her voice practically palpable. “A lot.”

There was a flare of magic, and Lyanna lifted onto her knees, bearing much of her weight down onto Cullen's arm. He became acutely aware of his bones grinding against one another, of his skin pulling together to seal over the open wound. His muscles flexed painfully tight. Feeling erupted back into his fingers, which flexed convulsively as severed tendons reconnected.

He then promptly, blessedly, blacked out for the second time that day. 


	3. Chapter 3

 “So she tenderly nursed you back to health.” Varric reached across the table, poured himself another few fingers of brandy. “How sweet.”

Cullen shook his head, smiling ruefully into his own glass. “I don't know that 'tenderly' is the word I'd use for it,” he said, draining the cup. “She pushed the bone back into my arm with her bare hand, and then I didn't see her again for almost two weeks.”

“That seems like a long time, considering she was your healer,” Varric said. He took the liberty of refilling Cullen's now empty glass as well.

“Only at first. After the bone was set, Chantry sisters handled changing bandages and the like,” Cullen explained. “No, the next time I saw her it was purely by accident.”

* * *

 

There was always a distance between the private lives of templars and mages-- a distance of approximately six floors. The templar living quarters occupied the bottommost levels of Kinloch Hold, while the mages resided at the very top, and sandwiched between the two were classrooms, storage, the tower's small Chantry, an infirmary, offices, and numerous other necessary rooms. In theory this kept a level of dissociation between the two orders; rarely should a mage see a templar out of uniform.

For the most part the templars and mages did keep to themselves, but it just wasn't possible to lock a few hundred people in a tower on a lake and expect them to stay entirely segregated. Friendly greetings and passing conversations were not uncommon, especially in the one place where commingling was accepted: the library.

The circle tower was home to several massive libraries, where apprentices were expected to familiarize themselves with magical theory and history. The libraries also routinely received periodicals from around Thedas. Off-duty templars regularly clustered around the shelves of new arrivals, jockeying for the latest penny dreadfuls. The early evenings were busiest, flocks of apprentices at their studies next to gaggles of initiates buried in their stories.

Cullen did his best to avoid the crowds, though, choosing instead to do his reading in the middle of the day or late at night. He would have avoided the libraries altogether if he could have; he didn't much enjoy hearing what he had missed out on over the course of the day's practical instruction. Unfortunately being an out-of-commission templar initiate was spectacularly boring, and the tower offered precious little else in the way of entertainment. So, in ten days with nothing else to do, he had made it through numerous histories, a handful of novels, several books on magical theory, a pictorial guide to edible plants in Rivain, three texts on dragon anatomy, and even a how-to manual on Orlesian embroidery.

The last he had finished purely on momentum, too stubborn and too bored to stop. Stitch counts and needle gauges now permanently burnt onto the inside of his eyelids, Cullen shut the book and rubbed the heel of his good palm against each eye. It had grown very late, the library around him silent and dark but for the candles illuminating his little corner. He blew them out, stood and stretched his stiffened spine.

He followed the gentle curve of the shelves towards the library's exit, guided mostly by moonlight spilling through the windows. The darkness was no hindrance, for one of the many advantages to life in the tower was that it was almost impossible to get lost. Keep walking, and you would eventually come full circle-- so to speak.

Ahead a light flickered through the shelves, likely a forgotten candle. He rounded the corner, intending to blow it out, but stopped short at the sight that greeted him.

A mage, alone in the circle of light from a single fat candle. She was poring over a thick tome on the table before her, scratching notes on a bit of parchment. He couldn't see her face through the curtain of her dark hair, but when she reached to turn the page her slender fingers seemed familiar.

The apprentice that had healed him in the yard, it had to be. “Lyanna?”

“Andraste's tits!” she yelped, jerking back in surprise. The sudden motion rattled her inkwell, splattering dark droplets on the tabletop and nearby papers. Lyanna hissed another curse, carefully blotting up splashes of ink with the edge of her sleeve.

“Sorry,” Cullen said quickly. His face burned, and he wanted to flee.

“It's fine,” she said, frowning at her now-stained robe. She started to roll her sleeve up, burying the ink in layers of fabric. “I just wasn't expecting anyone else in the library this late.”

“I, ah... I wasn't either,” he said. “I didn't think apprentices were allowed out this late.”

Fingers stilling on her sleeve, she turned her gaze to Cullen, eyes hardening when she recognized him for a Templar. “I'm allowed to be here, Ser,” she said, adamant, and pushed to her feet. Rifling through the various papers spread before her, Lyanna pulled a sheet free and thrust it towards him. “Signed and sealed by Irving _and_ the Knight-Commander.”

Jaw working, Cullen glanced down at the parchment. It was too dim for him to read, but by the signature and wax seals at the bottom, he could hazard a guess that it was a writ of permission for her to be out of the dorms after curfew.

“No, I'm sorry, I... I wasn't, I didn't mean-- I'm not even on duty!” he stammered, taking a step backwards, repelled by the force of her gaze. “I was just reading, I-i-i thought someone forgot to put a candle out--”

“You're not here to kick me out?” she asked warily. Slowly she lowered the writ back to the table.

“No, I'm not... I couldn't, anyway, I'm just an initiate.”

She scoffed. “As if that would stop some of your peers,” Lyanna said, lowering herself back onto the bench.

He thought to protest, but instead replied with, “That's... true.” Knowing a few of the more zealous recruits, he couldn't bring himself disagree with her.

Whatever she had been about to say he would never know, for her mouth snapped shut. Her head cocked at a curious angle, eyes narrowing with some inscrutable thought. “It was Cullen, right?”

His heart stuttered a beat. “Yes.”

“Why are you still all bandaged up?” she asked.

He glanced down at his arm, still strapped to his chest by a rough linen sling. “Er, well... arm's still not working, really,” he replied, shrugging. “The Chantry sisters said maybe another week, then I might be able to give up at least the sling.”

Lyanna frowned. “That can't possibly be right,” she said, patting the bench next to her. “Come, sit, let me look at it.”

Cullen hesitated a moment, shuffling anxiously from foot to foot, until Lyanna beckoned him forward again. “I won't bite, I promise,” she said, smiling.

The warmth of her expression decided him, and Cullen seated himself astride the bench, facing her. Turning to match his position, she helped him out of the sling, careful to support his wrist as she set the fabric aside.

She peered down at his bandaged arm, but the single candle wasn't enough to illumine much more than a tiny corner of the table. With a practiced flick of her wrist Lyanna lit the torch on the wall over her shoulder, bathing them in bright golden light. The sudden burst of magic set gooseflesh up his spine and down his arms, making him shiver. No matter how long he lived in the tower, he would likely never grow completely accustomed to the hum of power that even the smallest spells caused.

“Please don't tell anyone I did that,” she said, oddly sheepish at the tiny display.

He nearly asked why, but stopped himself. The mages, especially the apprentices, weren't supposed to work magic out of sight of a trained and armed Templar. “I won't,” he assured her.

Tucking raven hair behind her ear, she set to work. Carefully she undid the bandage, unwinding it with slow, deliberate motions. Yet even as mindful as she was, the jostling set his still-mending bone to aching. He held as still as he could.

When the wound beneath was finally exposed, Lyanna sucked her teeth. Just below his left wrist began a wide, angry red lesion. It was mostly scabbed over, the edges turning pink with scar tissue, but seeing it still made Cullen's stomach lurch. He looked away as she began carefully touching the edges, focusing on the book still open at Lyanna's elbow. On one side was neatly illuminated script too small for him to read at the distance. The opposite was a full-page illustration of a human body, stripped of skin to show the musculature beneath.

No better, and perhaps even worse, than watching her handle his injury.

“It shouldn't be open, still,” she murmured, to herself more than him. She touched a finger to the thin layer of ointment smeared over it, brought her hand closer to her face to determine what it was. “Is this... deep mushroom? Maker, what do those lay sisters think they're doing?”

She began to carefully re-bandage the arm, shaking her head and grumbling.

“Is... is everything alright?” he asked, with a growing concern for his own health.

Her eyes-- usually so blue, but darkened nearly to violet in the torchlight-- darted up to meet his, as though she suddenly remembered the arm was attached to a person. “Yes, fine,” she assured him. “I wish only they would have sent you back to us, rather than subjecting you to the Chantry's... antique healing methods. The sisters try, and I suppose they mean to help, but... well. You could be back in fighting form next week, rather than maybe losing the sling.”

“Oh,” he said, simply, unsure what else to say.

“So far as I can tell, they're using only lavender and deep mushroom for a poultice,” she said, tying off the bandage. As she helped him fold his arm back into the sling, she continued to explain.

“Honestly that would work, eventually. The lavender will keep it clean and the deep mushroom will close the wound-- faster than you could on your own, yes, but slower than is strictly necessary. Why they don't use elfroot _with_ it, I'll never understand. Perhaps it's all they had in their stores, since they also avoid our greenhouse.”

“Why would the Chantry healers avoid the greenhouse?” he asked, genuinely curious.

Lyanna shrugged, not looking up from her adjustments of his sling. “Perhaps out-of-season herbs are an abomination against the Maker,” she said. Finished with her task, she sat back, resting her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand. “They change your bandages, what, once a day?”

“In the afternoon,” he affirmed. Cullen rolled his shoulders, testing the tightness of the sling. Comfortable.

“Don't go to the lay sisters, tomorrow,” she said. “Find me in the infirmary, it's right above this library. I'll tell Wynne you're coming, so if anyone tries to stop you, she'll take care of it.”

“A-alright. Won't, ah... won't she wonder why you were alone with a Templar initiate in the library in the middle of the night?” The mere possibility that a Senior Enchanter could think he was being _indecent_ with an apprentice caused him to blush furiously.

“Well, I don't have to tell her that part, do I?” she said, and her smirk turned faintly wicked. “Besides, we're not doing anything lewd. Unless you broke your arm as some sort of elaborate ploy to corner an apprentice?”

 He thought his head might actually burst into flame. “I would _never_ , I-i-i-i was only--”

“Oh, I'm sorry,” she laughed, laying a hand on his arm. “I was only teasing, you truly don't seem the type.”

“It's... No, I...” Words failed to take any recognizable form in his mouth, though he managed a mumbled “Thanks?” He almost fainted in relief when she breezed past his fumblings.

“I'm glad you found me here,” she said, smiling kindly. “We'll get your arm sorted out sooner rather than later. However it's quite late. We should probably be on our way.” She stood, closed her book of terrifying illustrations and capped her inkwell.

Cullen pushed hastily to his feet. “You should go first,” he said, watching her gather tome and papers into her arms. “If the Templar on the door sees us leave together it could... end poorly.”

“Good thinking,” Lyanna replied, laying her quill atop her stack of papers and tucking the stoppered inkwell into a pocket of her robe. “Good night, Cullen. I'll see you tomorrow.”

With another wave of her hand the torch went out, and she disappeared into the surrounding darkness. He waited until her footsteps had long faded to blow out the candle.

* * *

 

“...And little did either of the young lovers know, this was the first of many secret trysts in the library.”

Cullen scowled at the smirking dwarf. “It wasn't like that.”

Varric shrugged. “It would make a great story if it was. Star-crossed lovers, apprentice and initiate, bound by chance and kept apart by duty... I take back what I said earlier. I might just write a book about this.”

“Don't you dare, Varric,” the commander warned. “I'm telling you this as a courtesy, not so you can twist it into some...”

“Into some best-selling novels?” Varric suggested.

“Into some perversion of the truth for monetary gain,” Cullen said flatly.

“Basically the same thing, really,” the dwarf shrugged. “I mean, you were there, what do you think a solid third of the Tale of the Champion was?”

“I didn't read it.”

Varric gasped, pressing a hand to his chest in mock offense. “Curly, I'm wounded! How could you skip my masterpiece?”

“You said it yourself, I was there. I have little desire to relive the entire... thing,” Cullen replied. “For a good eight years you and the Champion of Kirkwall were _truly_ spectacular pains my ass.”

“Did somebody say Champion of Kirkwall?”

Both dwarf and commander turned to the door. The light outside was quickly fading into dusk, but the tall, sturdy figure silhouetted in the twilight was unmistakably--

“Hawke!” Varric said cheerily.

The Champion strode into the room, grinning as always. “You've got a _massive_ hole in your roof, Knight-Captain,” she said, pointing to it.

“Yes, I've noticed it, and that is _not_ my title anymore,” Cullen snapped. His frown only deepened as Hawke perched herself on the arm of Varric's chair. She leaned over to liberate the glass from Varric's hand.

“What are we talking about?” she asked, sipping at her stolen beverage. “Me? Perfect.”

“Curly here was just telling me about his time with the Hero of Ferelden,” Varric explained.

“Well, don't stop on my account,” Hawke said, settling in and draping an arm over the back of Varric's chair. “Stories about the other side of the family are always thrilling.”

Despite a similarity in hair and eye color, it was often difficult for Cullen to remember that Hawke and Lyanna were cousins. They were so dissimilar, one extroverted and the other reserved. Where the Champion was well-muscled and solid, the Warden was willowy and lithe.

So as he remembered, anyway. He had to remind himself that his knowledge of Lyanna was more than ten years old.

“If I'm going to continue this, I need you to keep your colorful commentary to yourself,” he said, jabbing a finger at Hawke. He had already resigned himself to her staying, it wasn't worth the effort to get her to leave. Turning to Varric, he added, “And you, don't encourage her.”

“Quiet as a dormouse,” Hawke assured him.

“I can't make that promise,” Varric shrugged.

Cullen sighed, pressing a thumb forefinger into his eyes. “I will never be free of the two of you, will I?”


	4. Chapter 4

The infirmary was unexpectedly cheerful. Tinted glass vials of varying sizes lined the shelves that stood against, but perpendicular to, the room's curved inner wall. Sunlight spilling across the shelves threw jewel-toned shadows along the floor, much like stained-glass Chantry windows. Three large windows in the outer wall looked out over the blue-green waters of the Lake Calenhad. Potted herbs, some brightly flowering and some merely sprays of green, sat on the sills of each window. Beneath, a row of low cots were each draped with a patchwork quilt, a pillow at the head.

The cots were empty save for one, occupied by a sullen-looking but apparently otherwise healthy apprentice who sat on top of the sheets. He glowered over his book at Cullen, who stood uncertain in the doorway.

“Templar infirmary is at the bottom of the tower,” the apprentice said, a not-quite sneer of condescension in his voice.

“I'm, ah, looking for Lyanna, actually...” Cullen replied, rocking forward on the balls of his feet, attempting to peer around the shelves flanking the door. He hoped he wasn't too early, or too late. The Templar on the door cast a sidelong glance at the initiate, but said nothing. Lyanna must have followed through on her promise to tell Wynne he was coming.

“Lyanna!” the mage called, not taking his eyes off Cullen.

“What?” came the somewhat irritated reply, somewhere beyond the shelves.

“There's a Templar here for you,” he said, a distinct note of disdain on the word _templar_.

There was a rustling and the scrape of a chair towards the back of the room. Lyanna appeared around a shelf; the wary furrow of her brow brightened immediately when she saw Cullen.

She wore a deep blue robe, lightweight and low of neckline for the summer warmth. Her hair fell over her shoulder in a long braid.

“Hello,” he said, tapping his fingers nervously against his injured arm. “Is this a bad time?”

“Not at all. I've been expecting you,” she said, smiling amicably. “Come, I've been working on something!”

She beckoned him forward, retreating back the way she had come. There was an excited bounce to her step as he followed her around the row of shelves. In the corner, against the stone wall, was a dark oak desk. Stoppered jars and bundled dry herbs were arranged across one side of it, as well as a basin of clean water and a mortar containing some sort of paste. The pestle lay nearby, bits of ground plant still clinging to it.

“Please, sit,” Lyanna said, gesturing him to one of two chairs behind the desk. She seated herself in the other, pushing her sleeves past her elbow. Draping a clean cloth across her lap, she held out her hand. “Let's see the arm.”

The other apprentice had followed, and now hovered behind Lyanna, watching intently as she used a tiny, sharp set of shears to cut away Cullen's bandages.

“Aren't you supposed to be in a lesson, Jowan?” she asked, not looking away from her work.

The apprentice, Jowan, whined out a sigh. “It's rudimentary elemental control,” he huffed, shoulders slumping. “I hate it, I'm the oldest one there, it's embarrassing.”

“Perhaps you'd move on to the advanced lessons if you actually attended these,” Lyanna suggested, not unkindly. She had finished slicing through the bandage, and was now carefully peeling it away from the wound. Cullen looked away before the wound was revealed, his eyes falling on a thick tome sitting at the far corner of the desk. The spine read _L'Anatomie Illustré, par Henri de Gris_ in gold leaf.

Jowan expelled a long, exasperated breath. “Thank you, mother,” he said. “If I could just be the First Enchanter's favorite, like you...”

At that, Lyanna laughed. “I'm not his favorite,” she said, dropping the used bandages into an empty bin under the desk. Briefly she let go of Cullen's wrist to grip the edges of her chair and scoot it forward a little, until their knees were nearly touching.

“You are!” the other apprentice exclaimed. “Who else is allowed in the libraries after curfew, or apparently to tend patients without Wynne?”

“Plenty of other apprentices have writs of permission,” she said, sounding as though this were a conversation they'd had a hundred times. Dipping a cloth into the water basin, she set to carefully cleaning the previous days' salve away from the wound. “We work very hard for them. And the Senior Enchanter knows exactly what I'm doing, I went over all of it with her, and she'll be back any minute now.”

Behind her, Jowan began to protest again. “But I don't--”

“ _Jowan_ ,” Lyanna interjected firmly, her hands stilling on Cullen's wrist as she looked over her shoulder. “Go to your lesson. If you need, I can help you later tonight. But go, now, before Wynne comes back and you're in actual trouble. Again.”

“You'll help me?” he asked, shuffling a foot against the floor.

Lyanna's expression softened considerably. “Of course. I always do.”

“Alright,” Jowan mumbled. “Fine. Have fun with your Templar.”

She rolled her eyes, but seemed faintly sad as she watched him walk away.

“I wish he would try harder,” she said. “He'll never be a powerful mage but he could be decent. Good enough not to be made Tranquil.”

Unsure how to respond, Cullen remained quiet.

“I mean, he's a complete shit,” she continued, rinsing the cloth before returning to her work. “He's lazy and he whines constantly. But I've known him since I came to the tower. He was the first friend I made. I don't know what I'd do if he was gone.”

“They wouldn't kill him,” Cullen offered, hoping it was comforting somehow. At the sharp look she gave him, he faltered. “...Would they?”

“It might be kinder,” she said. “The Tranquil do the laundry and the dusting and the cooking, they manage the stores, they do enchantments, all by rote, and not much else.”

“That's worse than death? Managing the stores?” he asked, earnestly wondering. He thought that, if the alternative what a knife in the heart, he might prefer doing the laundry.

She recoiled.“Do you understand what the Tranquil are?”

“They're mages who've had their magic... bound?”

“Burned away,” she corrected, harsh.

* * *

 

“You really had no idea?” Hawke demanded, incredulous. Her usual affability vanished as she straightened in her seat, her tone severe. “You were in the tower how long at this point, and you'd never spoken to a Tranquil?”

The commander could only shake his head, shoulders lifting in half a shrug. “The Order was careful to keep us away from them.” he said, weary. “The Tranquil did all their work on the upper levels, where the mages lived. We did almost all of our training on the lower Templar floors, or in the shared middle floors-- dining halls, libraries, that sort of thing. And we would not know if we saw one even in passing. Kinloch Hold did not brand their Tranquil like cattle, as was done in Kirkwall.”

“Why all the secrecy?” Varric asked, matching Hawke's sudden dour expression.

“The Chantry went out of its way to ensure their Templar initiates were properly...” Cullen paused, searching for the right word. “Convinced, I suppose, that the Rite of Tranquility was a mercy on the weak, rather than a means of control.”  
“You mean brainwashed,” Hawke amended for him.

Heaving a sigh, Cullen sat back in his chair. “I... can't argue that,” he admitted. “The Templar Order wanted us to believe, firmly and without question, that the Tranquil were an ugly necessity in the Circles. By the time we were exposed to them with any regularity, we saw the Tranquil with disdain. They weren't strong enough to be Harrowed, but we could not suffer them to go on untested, a danger to everyone around them.”

His eyes went to the sleek wooden box at the corner of his desk, a constant reminder of his past, an ever-present temptation. Part of him imagined he could feel the hum of the lyrium, hear it singing in his veins. “I wish I could say I was different, that speaking to a tranquil mage, looking into empty eyes, made my skin crawl. Made me question my choice to join the Order,” he said, clenching his fist below the desk. “But I can't. Even after everything Lyanna eventually told me, the Chantry still kept me neatly pressed under its thumb.”

Both dwarf and Champion were shocked into silence at the admission. Hawke tilted her head with something like pity, but Varric remained inscrutable as he tapped his fingers thoughtfully against his mouth.

“That,” Cullen said quickly, “is neither here nor there. The point is, I hadn't the slightest clue what Tranquility truly meant, and I was about to get a lesson.”

* * *

 

Lyanna's ministrations lacked the elegance Cullen remembered from the training field. Her previous gentleness had been replaced by quick, clipped motions; he had to fight not to jerk away as she scrubbed at the wound.

“There's nothing left of them,” she spat. “No magic, no emotions, no dreams or desires... They're hollow. Shells of what they used to be.”

“I... I did not know,” he said, unsure what else to say. The rigid line of her posture suggested she would brook no argument.

Her eyes, still alight with fury, darted to meet his. “Well now you do,” she said. “If it ever comes to it, I would rather meet the headsman's blade than live like that. Better to be _dead_ than empty.”

The unwavering certainty in her voice mad Cullen's blood run cold. He could do no more than stare at her, caught between shock and horror, unable to comprehend the desire for death in such a young girl.

His dismay must have been written clearly across his face, for her glare eased into something else. Sadness, perhaps, or pity. Some measure of understanding.

“They really don't tell you what it is, do they?” she asked, softly.

Instinctively Cullen looked towards the entrance where, though hidden by rows of shelves and the curve of the wall, he knew a Templar would be listening.

“He can't hear us back here,” Lyanna said. “Trust me.”

Briefly he wondered what conversations went on at the back of this room that it was so important to be out of Templar earshot, then decided it was best he did not know.

“They don't,” he said simply. “Only that it is necessary, sometimes.”

Her lips parted as though she was going to say something, but her breath caught when she thought better of it. He nearly asked, but figured it would do no good. Whatever tenuous bond they'd shared, it had been severed by the reality of their stations.

“All clean,” she said instead.

Glancing down despite his better judgment, Cullen got a good look at his arm, in the full light of day, unobscured by ointment or bandage. All he made out was a gash of scabby red before his guts clenched, and he looked away again.

...Directly into the skirt of a crimson robe. Senior Enchater Wynne, straight as a rail on the opposite side of the desk, was looking appraisingly down her long nose at them.

“Hello, Senior Enchanter,” Lyanna greeted her, leaning across the desk to hook a finger in the mortar and drag it closer. The older mage caught the vessel from beneath her apprentice's grasp, lifting it to squint at the paste within.

“I suppose this is what you were so gleefully mixing when I left for my lesson?” she said, without preamble. She sniffed the mixture.

“It is,” Lyanna said. “Royal elfroot, white yarrow, and--”

“Dawn lotus? ” Wynne guessed.

Lyanna's grin was pleased, proud. “Yes! We had a little left from the last blooming, so I--”

“Used the last of a rare and powerful herb on an old wound?”

“Not the last.” Lyanna, undaunted by the hard look of her teacher, continued calmly, “Just a few leaves, there's still come left.”

“Still, dawn lotus is strong, for a wound that's been healing for weeks,” Wynne said. She set the mortar back on the desk, within her apprentice's reach.

“If you can call this Chantry butchery _healing_.” Lyanna angled Cullen's arm so the Senior Enchater could get a better look at it. “Their method seems to be 'smear some deep mushroom on it once a day and hope for the best.' Look at it, two weeks healed and nearly fresh.”

Wynne frowned, and moved around the desk to stand at Lyanna's side. She bent, gently taking Cullen's wrist and lifting it to get a good look at it. He was beginning to feel like some sort of healer's training dummy.

“The bone's knit underneath, mostly,” Wynne said, carefully palpating the bones in Cullen's wrist and running wizened fingers along the uninjured top of his forearm. “We could just Heal the wound closed, and set the poor boy on his way.”

Lyanna's expression was pensive. “We could, but...” she paused and glanced at Cullen, hesitating.

“Well, spit it out,” Wynne prompted. “He can handle it, can't you, initiate?”

Cullen only nodded. He wasn't sure he _could_ , but it didn't seem as though either mage would stop their frank discussion of his well-being.

“Corruption's starting to set in,” Lyanna said. “I suspected when I saw it yesterday, but now I'm sure. The wound is warm to the touch, and getting tight at the edges. It's not weeping, yet, but we would close the wound around the infection and it could just bubble up later.”

She glanced up at her teacher, who remained silent, as though waiting. “...So I'm using yarrow for the swelling,” she said, tentatively, and when she received no response, continued, “The dawn lotus should draw out the corruption, and royal elfroot as a catch-all restorative.”

Wynne straightened, smiled broadly. “Very good, apprentice,” she said.

“A test?” Lyanna asked flatly.

“It is my job as your teacher to keep you on your feet,” Wynne said. Carefully she shifted Cullen's wrist back into Lyanna's grasp. “It wouldn't do to let you become complacent, lest you become like the Chantry _butchers_ , as you called them. Seems like there's no risk of that, here, though.”

She turned her full attention on Cullen, then, something faintly wistful in her expression. “And you, initiate. Your name?”

“Cullen,” he said.

“Right. Maker help me, but I've got a soft spot for dewy-eyed young Templars,” she said. Cullen didn't protest the _dewy-eyed_ , though he somewhat wished to. “So, you'll come back here in the mornings after breakfast and the evenings after dinner, and either Lyanna or myself will keep you from getting your arm hacked off.”

“Y-yes, ma'am,” he said, swallowing hard at the mere hint of losing his arm.

“I'm going to speak with the Knight-Commander about the apparently woeful state of his Chantry healers,” the Senior Enchanter said. “Finish up quick, and send him on his way. You've still got jars to sort and label, apprentice.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Lyanna said, a wry smile pulling at her lips as she watched Wynne leave. With two fingers, she scooped out a thick portion of greenish paste and began applying it gingerly to the wound. The poultice had an earthy, not entirely unpleasant scent, and tingled a little on his skin.

“Is... is there really a chance you'll have to cut it off?” he asked, voice strangled.

“No,” Lyanna snorted. “Even the lay sisters wouldn't have let it get to that point. I assume, anyway.”

“Oh. Well, good, I guess,” he replied.

It wasn't long before she was winding clean, white bandages around his arm again. The motions were quick and practiced, and he watched, fascinated. He wondered how many injuries she had tended within the relative safety of the tower to gain such deft hands.

“Alright,” she said, tying off the bandage. “This should hold you until tonight, when we'll clean and dress it again.”

She stood then, edging around the desk, and he followed suit.

“Thank you,” he said, as they started for the exit. “It already feels... better, I guess, than after the sisters handled it.”

“I'm glad I could help,” she replied simply. When they reached the door, she suddenly put a hand on his arm. “Oh! I almost forgot. Is it terribly sore?”

“Mostly first thing in the morning,” he shrugged.

“Wait here a moment,” she said, and vanished back into the row of shelves. The faint clink and rattle of glass vials being moved around followed her, and soon she returned with a small folded paper packet.

“This is willowbark and a little spindleweed, dried,” she said, pressing the packet into his hand. “Steep a little of it in hot water, like a tea. It should take some of the edge off any pain.”

He tucked the herbs into his pocket. “Thank you,” he repeated. “I'll see you... tonight, I suppose?”

“Probably not. I have other studies I must attend to. Wynne will be here in the evening,” she replied.

Crestfallen and trying not to show it, he nodded. “Of course.”

“I'll be around in the morning, though,” she added, with a smile. “So I'll see you then.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks everyone for the lovely reviews :) i'm glad you're all enjoying it!  
> 


	5. Chapter 5

Somewhere along the line a servant had come through and lit the torches on the tower walls. Outside the sky had grown dark, the practice yards below silent. The bustling sounds of keep life given way to crickets and the soft sighs of mountain winds. Inside, Cullen tugged off his gloves and set them on the desk next to his empty glass.

“We may need to continue this tomorrow,” he said, pushing a hand through his hair and then scrubbing it over his face. “It's been a long day.”

The protests were immediate and adamant, Varric nearly elbowing Hawke off the edge of the chair in his rush to argue. “You can't stop there!” he exclaimed. “What sort of pacing is that? You've just had your meet cute, you're finally getting to know each other... it's just getting good!”

“What he said,” Hawke agreed, jerking her thumb at the dwarf, resettling onto the arm of the chair.

“You just enjoy hearing about my youthful stumblings,” Cullen said flatly.

“Well, yes, there is also that,” she said, shrugging. “You probably don't have to be _so_ honest about what a delightfully awkward teenager you were.”

Varric nudged Hawke's thigh with his elbow. “Quit antagonizing the man, he'll start lying to get us out of here quicker.”

“No, I won't, Cassandra would just _know_ , and I don't want to retell the whole thing to her, again, while she burns holes in my skull with her eyes.” An involuntary shudder went down the commander's spine at the mere thought.

Varric barked a laugh. “Are you kidding? How starry-eyed would she be at this, unrequited love in the Circle tower. She laps this kind of shit up like a deer on a salt lick.”

Hawke leaned forward, putting a hand near her mouth as though the Seeker might hear her from wherever she was in the keep, and said, “It's true, she has a whole shelf of trashy romance novels in her bedroom.” Glancing at Varric, she added, “Including yours!”

“Really! Interesting...” Varric said, eyes glinting with possibility.

Frowning, Cullen asked, “When were you in Cassandra's chambers?”

“Don't worry about it,” Hawke replied, sitting back. She pressed a finger to her lips and murmured, “Shh.”

“Just give us fifteen more minutes, one more good chunk of the story, and we'll be out of your hair for the night,” Varric said quickly.

Resigned, Cullen reached for the brandy bottled and poured himself a fresh, generous glass.

* * *

 

The rest of week passed in mostly unremarkable fashion. He dutifully returned to the mage's infirmary every morning and evening. There was never anyone else laid up on the cots, though most afternoons found Jowan lounging sulkily nearby. He usually found some excuse to leave, an irritated scowl on his face, when Cullen arrived.

Most visits he was tended to by Lyanna, but occasionally Wynne. In truth he preferred the apprentice to the Enchanter, for Lyanna was easy with her smiles and gentle with her hands, where Wynne was stern of expression and succinct, almost military in her ministrations. Which was not to say that she was rude, merely that he felt less like a wayward child around the younger mage.

His wound was markedly improved after even just the first visit, the swelling and heat of it noticeably reduced by Lyanna's concoction. On the fourth day, rather than change the dressing and send him on his way within a few minutes, she had him sit for a while with his arm laid across her desk.

“To give it some fresh air,” she said, settling into her seat. She pulled _L'Anatomie Illustre_ across the desk, flipping it open to whatever gory illumination she was reading about today,

They sat for a while in silence, Cullen tapping the fingers of his good hand against his thigh, trying to read the tiny script on the labels of the jars and vials on the nearest shelf. The only sounds were the occasional turning of a page, and the distant twittering of birds outside the open window.

“What is that book you're always reading?” he asked, when the silence finally became too much.

“Gris' Anatomy,” she said, without looking up from the page as she continued to scribble a note. Reaching the end of the line, she set down her quill and looked up. “A surgeon in Orlais published it a few years ago. He dissected corpses of the recently deceased to learn the bones and musculature of the human body.”

Cullen felt vaguely ill. “That's...”

“Horrifying!” Lyanna supplied, with a decidedly un-horrified gleam in her eye. “But the knowledge gained... it's incredible. Invaluable, to a healer. I wish it was taught in our formal studies, but I haven't been able to convince Irving that we should learn more than just the healing spells.”

Puzzled, Cullen asked, “Why would you need to know more than the spells?”

“Spells fail,” she said. “Or if I've exhausted my magic and there are still wounded, I should know how to set bones without it. Knowing how the body works, without magic, will help me to better heal it _with_. And to treat the things magic struggles with. I can knit bone, close wounds. I could reattach a severed arm if I had to, but if you were poisoned I wouldn't be able to do much about it. That's why I love herbs so much: magic is a finite resource.”

He let that sink in for a moment before asking anything else. For the duration of his templar training, Cullen had been under the impression that all mages were deep wells of barely controlled power. At any moment the dam within them could burst, drowning everyone around them in fire and blood. Thus the necessity for templars, brave individuals ready to contain that power.

“So you can't just... heal forever?”

She scoffed. “No. Do they teach you _anything_ in those templar lessons?”

Glancing at the mostly-healed wound on his arm, he frowned. “Apparently not.”

 

* * *

 

“If nothing else, this is giving me a _lot_ of insight into why the templars... have become what they are,” Varric said, eyes drawn to that little box on the desk.

“You and I both, honestly,” Cullen admitted. “Perhaps, had things... gone differently, I might have left the order much sooner.”

“And yet you didn't,” Hawke said, quirking an eyebrow. “In fact, if I recall our lovely meetings in Kirkwall correctly, you became _very_ zealous.”

The commander's expression darkened considerably. “I am _not_ proud of that,” he snapped. “Events transpired--”

“The fall of Kinloch Hold,” Hawke needled. “Why don't you tell us about that?”

“We'll get there when we get there,” Varric cut in, before the two could come to blows. “Please, Commander, keep going, if you like.”

He continued, if only to get through the whole thing as fast as possible.

 

* * *

 

 

The next day proved nearly as enlightening as the last. When he arrived, Lyanna was alone at the desk, no sign of Jowan or Wynne. She didn't seem to hear his approach, and he found himself standing just next to the nearest shelf, watching her for a moment, as he had in the library days earlier.

Today her dark hair was piled haphazardly on her head, her robes a mossy green with the same wide neckline she seemed to favor. She sat forward, elbows on the desk, brow furrowed as she turned some small thing in her hands. It was a square of parchment that she was carefully folding numerous times. In just a few moments she finished, and he saw it had been folded into a little bird, which she set next to a small row of it's fellows. From a small stack, she plucked another square of paper.

“That's quite a skill,” he said.

She yelped, dropping the parchment in surprise, and turned an exasperated look on him. “I'm going to put a bell on you,” she said. “You're _far_ too silent for such a large person.”

“Sorry.” He slid into his usual chair next to her desk, reflexively hunching to make himself smaller.

As she set to unwinding his bandage, he glanced again at that little line of paper birds. “Where did you learn to do that?” he asked.

Following the line of his gaze, she smiled faintly. “Owain,” she said, and turned her attention back to her work.

Thinking over the mages he was familiar with, he couldn't place the name. “Is he another apprentice?”

Her fingers stilled on his arm, and her expression shuttered. “No,” was all she said before setting back to wiping the salve from his wound.

Most of the Senior Enchanters were known to him, but no Owain. Perhaps he was reclusive. “An Enchanter?”

A sigh escaped her, and she sat back, dropping the soiled cloth into the basin. “He's Tranquil. He was an apprentice when I arrived, and now he's Tranquil.”

“Oh, I-- Sorry,” he murmured. “I didn't mean--”

“It's fine,” she said curtly, then sighed again. “I was five years old when I came to the tower. Jowan was seven, and he was the first _friend_ I had, because we were smallest. Owain was an older student, maybe seventeen when I got here, I'm not sure. But he always looked after the little ones.”

She looked away, out the nearby window, but her eyes were distant. “One night when I was awake, crying because I missed my mother, he taught me how to fold those paper birds. He said his mother had taught him, before he left for the Circle, and that every little bird was a memory. If I put the little birds under my pillow at night, they would fly to my mother, and she wouldn't ever forget me.”

He had known, intellectually, that some mages were taken that young from their families. He had seen the handful of children around the tower, but had never really considered what it meant.

“It must be difficult, to be so far from your family,” he said, thinking on how much he missed his sisters.

“Not anymore,” she said with a faint shrug. “The tower is my home now, and the Circle is my family. I don't know if my mother is even still alive, out there somewhere.”

Swallowing a sudden knot in his throat, Cullen said nothing.

“Anyway, every night after that, I would fold a little bird and put it under my pillow, and the next morning it was gone,” she continued. “I have no idea what he did with them. One day, I just stopped. I stopped missing my mother, and I stopped leaving bits of paper under my pillow.”

There was something incredibly sad about that, but Cullen couldn't find a way to voice it. His heart hurt for the little girl who had forgotten her mother.

As she spoke, Lyanna had absently returned to her work on his arm, cleaning away the last of the salve and setting his arm on the desk to dry out. “He volunteered to be made Tranquil,” she said, picking at some unseen scuff on the desktop. A frown pulled at the corners of her mouth, a matching anger creeping into her words. “He was so afraid of the Harrowing that he allowed the Chantry to burn his magic, his _life_ , away.”

“Is that common?” he asked quietly. “To volunteer for Tranquility rather than be Harrowed?”

“No. I'm sure he's not the first, but he's the only one here that I know of. But he was so wonderful, he was so kind to the younger apprentices... I miss him so much, even though he's still here. He minds the stores two floors up, he greets me when I walk by, but he's not _there_.”

He wanted to ask if she feared it, the Harrowing. If she would consider Tranquility over whatever the test entailed, but remembered her words from their previous conversation and knew the answer. _Better dead than empty_.

At the moment, he couldn't help but agree. The thought of her emotionless and without ambition was distressing.

“I think, Ser, that we might be done with our daily visits,” she said, the abrupt change of topic catching Cullen off guard. Leaning forward, Lyanna brushed her fingers over the pink scar tissue on his wrist, the remnants of a scab in the center. “This has healed up very nicely, if I do say so myself.”

Still jarred by the swift shift in mood, Cullen cleared his throat once and agreed. “You're very talented at this,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” she said, and stood gracefully. He followed suit, but didn't immediately turn to leave.

“Thank you, also, for-- for being... nice,” he stammered. “I-i know you didn't have to be.”

“I suppose I didn't,” she agreed, and smiled. “But what would I have gained by being unfriendly? Besides, I might miss our daily chats. Really broke up the day.”

Despite his best efforts to repress it, he felt his cheeks and the tips of his ears flush red. “Me, ah... me too.”

She hesitated a moment, contemplating something, then plucked on of the paper birds from the row. Gently she reached and lifted his now-healed wrist, pressing the bird into his upturned palm.

“A memory,” she said, closing her fingers over his around the token. Her hands, always so soft and warm, now burned on his skin.

 

* * *

 

Hawke and Varric were staring. Under his desk, Cullen shuffled a boot uneasily against the floor, feeling his ears color now as they had so many years ago.

“Holy shit Cassandra might _actually_ die when I tell her this,” Varric said finally, eyes bright with the thought. “I'm sorry, Curly, but this is _great_ material. You have to let me--”

“Get out,” Cullen said tightly.

“Alright, alright,” the dwarf said, sliding to his feet and stretching. “We'll leave you alone for the night. Thank you for indulging me.”

Hawke bounced to her feet. “See you tomorrow, Knight-Captain!” she said, slinging her arm over the dwarf's shoulders as they exited.

Cullen, who had followed them to the door, frowned prodigiously. “That's _not my title_!” he called after the pair now strolling down the walkway back to the castle proper. Hawke didn't look back, only offering a lazy wave over her shoulder.

He closed the door-- locking it as well, given Hawke's newly admitted propensity for snooping, not that it was likely to stop her-- and heaved a deep, slow breath. Returning to his chair, he finished the last of the brandy in his glass, letting the warmth of it settle through his ribs. It had been years since he'd dwelled so long on his life in the tower. Weary to his bones, he shrugged out of his heavy coat, draping it on its peg behind the desk, before starting for the ladder to his bed.

And paused at the foot of it, his attention pulled to the bookshelf in the corner. Crossing to it, his hand went for a well-worn, cloth-and-board bound copy of the Chant, fingers hesitating a moment before pulling it from the shelf. On the cover was the seal of the Templar order, faded and fraying. It had been given to him when he completed his vigil, upon his entry into the order proper.

The spine creaked faintly as he opened it, to an unmarked page in the middle. It was tucked there, flattened and stained with blood or mud or just age, the folds of it familiar under his touch.

A memory.

 


	6. Chapter 6

“So, when last we left our intrepid initiate, he was adorably bumbling his way through the fledgling flirtations of young lovers.”

Cullen couldn't even bring himself to bristle at Varric's insinuation. His mood had been sufficiently lubricated by the bottle and a half of wine they'd gone through since Hawke and Varric's twilight arrival at the tower. They'd brought four, along with dinner, Varric claimed as an apology for arriving so late and Hawke stated, bluntly, “Because the wine cellar is full and it's not like anyone else is using it.”

At least the dwarf had had the courtesy to wait until Cullen was well fed and his tongue loosened by alcohol to get down to it.

“I didn't much see Lyanna for a while after that. It wasn't long after my arm was healed that I took my vigil,” he said, without preamble. “A day and a night kneeling in the Chantry, meditating on the word of Andraste.”

“Mediating on what might be under a certain apprentice's robes,” Hawke murmured.

“Ignore her,” Varric said, cutting his friend a not-unappreciatve look. “You do this before they admit you to the Order, I assume?”

Narrowing his eyes at Hawke, Cullen continued, “Yes. At the end of it you swear your vows, they grant you your armor and a Templar marked copy of the Chant, and...” He paused, the ghost of an ache in his veins. “And they give you your first taste of lyrium.”

“If I may ask,” Varric said carefully, as though approaching a bear, “what was that like?”

Cullen swallowed, remembering as though it were yesterday and not almost twenty years. “The first time, you can feel it in your teeth and under your skin.”

“Pain? Does it hurt?”

“No. Power. It's raw power, and you know in that instant that you will make mages bend before you, and that with a press you could break them.” He gazed into his mostly empty mug, but didn't really see the contents. “After that it's... less heady. But it gives you an awareness of magic that you didn't have before. You can feel the connection between a mage and the Fade, and you can sever it. Not permanently, but long enough to...”

Hawke had grown very still. “Long enough to kill them.”

“Yes,” Cullen said, unflinching from the hard stare the mage now gave him. “Or capture. But the price is... high. Dependency, on the lyrium itself and the feeling of power it gives you. The security of it.”

“And since only the Chantry trades in lyrium with Orzammar, dependency on them,” Varric mused aloud.

Silence settled over the occupants of the tower, thick and uncomfortable.

“Well that got dark,” Hawke said, frowning into her wine.

“Why don't we get back to the tale at hand,” Varric suggested. “You took your vigil, you're a real Templar now, and...?”

Cullen took a deep, steadying breath, pushing away blue-tinted memories. “And not much. After the vigil there's a few weeks training in magical containment, learning the mages' floors, witnessing a Harrowing. It was a month and a half before I saw Lyanna even in passing. In between it was... not what I anticipated. ”

 

* * *

 

Being a Templar was deeply, surprisingly, astoundingly _boring_. As a boy when Cullen had pictured himself as the first line of defense against the threat of mages, it had involved considerably more action. Hunting apostates, cutting down maleficarum, weedling out and slaying blood mages. Perhaps subduing a Witch of the Wilds.

What he had not imagined was so much standing and watching. Standing in the library and watching mages read. Standing in the kitchens and watching mages eat. Standing in the hallways and watching mages go about their days without even the _hint_ of being possessed by demons. To them, the Templars posted on the doors may as well have been statues. They carried on their conversations and lived their lives with barely a glance at their silent watchers.

It likely didn't help his boredom that, as a junior member of the Order, Cullen received the duties others didn't want. At the docks in the middle of winter; in the classrooms where the youngest mages were learning fire spells for the first time.

Overnight in the empty libraries.

One such night, belly full from dinner and only the soft light of a single nearby torch illuminating his post, Cullen found himself drowsing. He stood along the wall, in the space between two shelves that reached as high as the ceiling. Before him was a narrow, plush red carpet and a table, which during the day would have held mages at their studies, but now bore only unlit candles.

Around him the library was so still it was as though the entire portion of the tower had slipped out of time. In that silence, his eyelids drooped, head nodding until he caught himself. Rubbing the heels of his gloved hands into his eye sockets, he wondered if anyone would even notice if he took a quick nap on the bench.

“Oh, hello Cullen.”

He dropped his hands immediately to his sides, posture straightening to attention. Lyanna stood at the head of the table, with an armful of books and parchment.

“Writ of permission,” he said, reflexively, and mentally kicked himself when her expression fell an almost imperceptible amount.

“Oh... Here,” she said, and adjusted her grip to free one of her hands. His shoulders slackened as she rifled through her belongings, and shortly produced the asked-for writ. “I already showed it to the Templar on the door.”

“I... sorry,” he said, taking the offered paper and glancing over it. It was likely the exact same sheet she'd shown to him the first time he'd encountered her in the library, a handful of months past, all the seals and signatures in order. “I have to ask.”

“Of course.” Lyanna took back the paper with a curt nod. Moving down to the far end of the table, she set down her belongings and lit the handful of fat candles in their dish. Without a second glance at the Templar not fifteen feet away, she set to her reading.

All weariness left him as he tried not to watch her at her studies, folding his hands at the small of his back and instead watching a point on the dark far wall. It was difficult, though, for his eyes were naturally drawn to the pool of candlelight. The long lines of her profile, the elegant curve of her neck were outlined in the dimness, a point of softness among the looming, shadowy shelves.

And every time she shifted he would snatch his gaze away, acutely aware of how inappropriate it was.

After a time, without looking up from her notes, she said, “You can sit if you want.”

“Uh...” he said, eloquently, and fought the urge to nervously rub his neck. “Thank you but... I can't.”

She said nothing else, and after an hour or so she gathered her things, blew out the candles, and left him alone to the silence.

 

Lyanna did not always turn up when Cullen was on night rotation in the libraries, but did so often enough that he began to half expect it. The first few times she offered again to let him sit, but duty kept him against the wall. After a handful of refusals she stopped asking.

He didn't know what gave him courage, but some weeks later he asked, “What are you studying?”

Caught off-guard by the voice in the darkness, she turned a wide-eyed look on him. “Oh, um, Genitivi's _Fade and Spirits Mysterious_ ,” she said. “Research for my lesson with Irving tomorrow, a theoretical discussion on the nature of the Fade. I've also got a Chantry treatise on demons but I don't think I'll get through it tonight.”

Just Irving, he noted, and not Grand Enchanter. “You don't read in your rooms?”

“My room is shared with thirteen other apprentices,” she said. As Lyanna spoke, Cullen found himself drawing closer to the table. “I do study there, sometimes, but then someone complains about the candlelight, or there's snoring or some other noise. And I have the bottom bunk, so I can't quite sit up all the way.”

By the time Lyanna finished, Cullen had sat just at the edge of the bench. “It was the same with the initiates. We were ten to a dormitory,” he said, gauntleted hands coming to rest briefly on the table before he nervously shifted them back to his lap. Their previous conversations, hidden away in the corner of the infirmary, had seemed... private. Safe, untouched by the greater nature of the tower. In the library, with its high ceilings and wide spaces between the shelves, he felt exposed.

“They're outside in the hall, they can't see you,” Lyanna said, noticing Cullen's wary glance in the direction of the unseen door. “And you can hear a Templar coming, this late at night. All that plate, you clank like dropped pots.”

He let out a breathy chuckle. He felt like a bird ready to fly away at the slightest sound. “Yes, er... I suppose we would.”

“Do you get your own room, now you're a real Templar?” She had set her quill down and rested her elbow on the wooden tabletop, chin in hand.

“No, but I've only got one roommate,” he said.

“That must be lovely,” she said, wistfully. “The Enchanter's quarters are still four to a room. I have to be a Senior Enchanter to get my own space... and you've seen how old they all are. Perhaps by the time I'm fifty I'll get to be alone, ever.”

“Knight-Captains get their own quarters, too. I hear the Knight-Commander has an entire suite, but I've never seen it,” he replied, slowly becoming aware that he might be sharing more information than was entirely prudent. Perhaps if the mages didn't know the layout of the Templar quarters, it was for good reason.

“I should let you work,” he said, standing quickly, backing up towards the far wall and his post.

“Oh, you weren't...” Lyanna's words trailed, as she seemed as startled by his retreat as she had been by his advance. “Well, thank you for the break, anyway.”

 

The next time she spoke first, stretching her back and rolling her shoulders against the stiffness that came from hunching over a desk for hours.

“Where are you from?”

The question was sudden and unexpectedly personal, and Cullen wasn't sure he'd heard it at all.“Excuse me?”

“Surely you weren't born here,” she said, leaning one arm on the table as she turned to face him. “And you know all about where I grew up,” she added, gesturing to the room around them with her free hand.

“Honnleath,” he said. “It's... south of here, and a little east.”

“Is it a big town?”

He shrugged. “Not particularly? It isn't tiny, either, there's a chantry and two inns. But it isn't like Denerim, or even Redcliffe.”

“You've been to Denerim?” she said, and from amount of awe in her voice it was as if he'd told her he'd slain a dragon.

“Once, a few years ago, with my father and my older sister,” he said. “My cousin was getting married.”

“Can you...” she paused, biting her lip, as though suddenly unsure. “Can you tell me what it was like?”

“Oh, uh, sure, if you want,” he said.

“It's just... I've never been anywhere,” she explained hastily. “A lot of the Senior Enchanters, and Irving, get to leave now and then, but... Apprentices are stuck here. I haven't even been to the little town across the lake.”

The “little town” wasn't much more than a small handful of ramshackle cottages and a seedy inn for travelers and off-duty Templars, but he felt like it might be cruel to tell her that. For the first time, he became aware of just how sheltered many of the mages were.

“Denerim was... huge,” he started. “I had no idea cities could be that large, I only knew Honnleath and some of the closer, smaller villages.”

Somewhere during his tale he found himself sitting at the table, nearer this time, perhaps less than three feet of bench separating them. Lyanna was rapt as Cullen told her about cobbled streets wide enough to admit three wagons abreast, inns on almost every corner, the Chantry large enough to hold hundreds. It was the first time he had met a dwarf, shilling fine crafts from Orzammar.

The wedding itself was like any other, though when she asked for every detail of it he realized she had of course never attended one. Mages weren't allowed to marry. So he told her about the food and the dancing; the ceremony itself with the bride in her white dress, the proud fathers, the children with flowers in their hair.

“I should like to go sometime,” she said longingly. “Just once, even for a day, to see a city like that.”

“If the Senior Enchanters travel, I'm sure you will one day, as well.” He hoped it was as encouraging as he meant it to be.

She laughed. “Yes, when I'm wizened and grey, I might finally leave this place.”

“You're clever enough I'm sure you'll be a Senior Enchanter in half the usual time,” he said, and immediately flushed to his ears. The compliment was more forward than he had yet been, more forward than he _should_ ever be.

Lyanna only smiled and looked down at her books and said, softly, “Thank you.”

* * *

 “And how long before you kissed her in the candlelight?”

Cullen sputtered, nearly dropping his wine glass. “I never-- it wasn't like that,” he said, setting the glass on the desk before he crushed it. “We never...”

“Come on, Curly, two teenagers don't repeatedly meet in secret at night and _never_ do anything about it,” Varric said. “How many times did you conveniently run into each other?”

“Once or twice a week, over a few months...” He paused, only now understanding just how often Lyanna sought out his post, when she could easily have found a dozen unoccupied corners of the library. At the time he hadn't given it any thought.

“A few _months_?” Varric said, incredulous. “What did you _do_?”

“We just... talked. She told me about her lessons, or about her work in the greenhouse. I told her about life outside the tower. Sometimes she recommended books to me. It was nothing untoward,” Cullen insisted. “I learned more about mages from her than I did from years of Templar training and Chantry doctrine. It was all very educational.”

“Educational,” Varric repeated, slowly. “Cassandra was not kidding when she called you dutiful to your own detriment.”

“What, were there no patrols in the tower? I thought you Templars took the ever-vigilant thing very seriously,” Hawke said, arching one dark eyebrow.

A sigh, and Cullen explained, “At the time we just... didn't think we needed them. Escape attempts were few and far between. We didn't know what was coming, later.”

For once neither Varric nor Hawke pressed the issue, for which Cullen was glad.

“In all that time,” Varric said instead, “You're telling me you never sealed the deal?”

“I was a Templar and she was an apprentice,” he said, plaintive. “It was already wildly out of line for us to even be talking like we did, let alone... sealing anything. I never put a hand on her.”

“You're lying.” Sitting forward in her chair, Hawke grinned.

“I'm not--” Cullen started, but Hawke pounced.

“Oh, come off it, you're an awful liar,” she cajoled. “Your ears are turning red. You absolutely did _something_.”

He opened his mouth to protest, but only exhaled instead, yielding. “All right, fine. But it wasn't in the library,” he admitted. “It was in the greenhouse.”

 


	7. Chapter 7

After a handful of months standing the more odious watches, Cullen was moved to a more permanent posting. The first few days it seemed like chaos reigned the mage floors; a constant bustle of apprentices to and from their lessons, Enchanters stopping where they stood to debate some arcane knowledge, an endless flow of gossip that he only heard the edges of.

Soon, though, he caught the rhythm of mage life. He began to recognize the patterns of their movement, picking up what time these apprentices were off to that lesson, when those Enchanters were going to lunch. He learned their names, and they his, and most of them were at least passing cordial with a smile or a nod.

He knew that every day, just after two in the afternoon, Lyanna walked by on her way to her duties in the infirmary.

Most days Jowan trailed her, and rolled his eyes when Lyanna would greet Cullen as they passed. Occasionally if she were alone, she would pause and they would exchange cursory pleasantries, but never more than that. His missed their meetings in the library, but knew those conversations were now firmly in the past.

Until one day, even though Jowan was with her, she stopped before him.

“Good afternoon, ser,” she said, a curt nod of her head.

“A-apprentice,” he stammered, briefly put off by the formalities.

“I would request a favor,” she continued, and behind her Jowan pulled a face.

“What are you _doing_?” the other apprentice demanded.

“I need to go to the greenhouse,” she said, ignoring her friend.

Cullen glanced at Jowan, equally confused. “Apprentices are allowed onto the grounds with proper permission and an Enchanter escort,” he said, simply repeating what his superiors had told him.

“No, not right now. Tonight,” she explained. “I need night-blooming crystal grace for a salve I'm working on. Greagoir told me if I could find a Templar willing to escort me, I could go.”

He stared at her, silent.

“So... will you escort me?” she asked.  
“I... yes, of course,” he replied, quickly. Too quickly, probably.

Her smile was equally quick, and bright, and his chest tightened. “Thank you, Ser Cullen. If you'll meet me at the infirmary, this evening, after my duties are done?”

* * *

“This can't possibly be real,” Hawke scoffed. “It's even more unbelievable than half the shit _you_ write.”

“Hey, now,” Varric protested. “I strive for a balance between believability and a good read and I like to think I accomplish that. That being said, sending one Templar and one apprentice out to a greenhouse at night seems like asking for trouble.”

“Any other apprentice would have been denied outright,” Cullen explained, unable to suppress a small smile. “But this is the same woman who made a bastard into a king and turned the Bannorn against Ferelden's greatest living hero, is it really a surprise she could talk the Knight-Commander into letting her out of the tower?”

“Well,” said Hawke, “When you put it that way.”

* * *

At just after nine that night, Cullen found himself in the infirmary watching Lyanna shuffle items into a satchel.

“I'll need to do my work while we're there,” she explained, tucking a few empty jars into the bag. “I would just bring the flower back here and save you the time but it's best to work quickly, while it's as fresh as possible. Do you need to be up terribly early tomorrow morning?”

“No earlier than usual,” he replied. Templars woke at dawn, but he didn't tell her that.

“Good. It shouldn't be too late, but I'd hate to keep you too long.” A book, a ceramic mortar and pestle, and two stoppered phials followed the jars into the satchel. Seemingly satisfied, she hefted the bag to her shoulder. “After you.”

The trip to the tower entrance was quick, the only Templars to question their passing being the ones on the front door. Lyanna offered her writ, as always properly signed and sealed by the Knight-Commander and the First Enchanter, and they were waved through without further questioning.

Outside the night air was chill, the water of the lake cooling the autumn breeze just to the point of frigid. The cold cut through his armor and as Lyanna bent to unlock the door Cullen wondered how, clad in only her robe, she wasn't actively shivering.

He didn't have to freeze long, for the air inside the greenhouse was warm, thick with the smell of soil and greenery. Taking a position at the entrance, he surveyed the room.

As was to be expected, plants filled the majority of the space. A rack of tools-- spades, trowels, shears, several pairs of thick gloves-- stood to the left of the entrance. Along the left wall were trellises with climbing vines, and along the right were a collection of flower bushes. In one corner stood a small tree in a large pot. Between the bushes and vines, along low tables, were potted herbs and flowers of every imaginable species. Some, like marrigolds and elfroot, he recognized, but most he couldn't name. In the center of the room, flanked by two stools, was a workbench. A line of small glass oil lamps hung from the center beam of the roof, which Lyanna lit with a practiced flick of her wrist, bathing the space in muted orange light.

“You may as well sit,” she said, gesturing to the stools as she set down her satchel. “It might be a bit.”

“Thank you but I'll stand,” he said, keenly aware of the two Templars on the outer tower doors. There were a hundred yards of darkness between them and the greenhouse, but Cullen felt as if his fellows were looking directly into the rippled glass panes, searching for any sign of impropriety.

“Suit yourself,” she replied, unloading the contents of the bag.

She neatly lined the worktop with the implements of her craft, before retrieving a set of shears from the rack at the entrance. The flower she needed came from a spindly vine bearing large, upturned blue blossoms with red pistils; even in the dim light, Cullen could see the thorns along the vines. Selecting three of the larger blooms, Lyanna carefully trimmed them and brought them to her work space.

It was not long before he regretted his choice to remain standing at the door. The warmth of the greenhouse wasn't unbearable, but it was pressing and moist. Sweat pricked up the back of his neck, and he began to envy Lyanna her lighter clothing.

“I see you changed your mind,” she said as he lowered himself onto the stool next to where she stood.

“It is... warmer than I anticipated,” he replied.

“Hmm,” she murmured, the barest noise of understanding as she returned to her work.

As ever he was entranced by her hands, every motion of her slender fingers a lesson in deftness. With practiced motions she separated the flower—each petal as long as her palm –setting them in a little pile near her elbow. A thin, sharp knife gleamed in her grip as she scored the petals. Clear fluid welled up along the cuts, pooling in the bottom of the mortar where they were placed. Taking up the pestle, she began to further crush the crystal grace. Soon she added a handful of other, dried herbs and the contents of a slim phial, and ground the entire mixture into a thick, yellowish paste.

“And now we wait,” she said, setting the concoction aside. “Have to let it cure for half an hour.”

Settling onto her own stool, she turned to face Cullen. “Did you read the book I told you about?”

“Only half of it,” he admitted.

The half hour passed quickly as they talked, mostly about nothing. Her studies, his new duties, whatever new rumor was spreading around the castle. At some point the conversation turned to the upcoming Satinalia, and whether he would be returning home for the holiday. Unfortunately not that year, but perhaps the next.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” she said. “I know you would like to see your brother and your sisters.”

“I would,” he agreed. “I'd like to see the celebrations again, too. Honnleath at Satinalia is beautiful, the whole town is decorated with ribbons and colored lanterns.”

“It's not so different in the tower,” Lyanna said. “And there's music, and the masks. Gifts, too.”

“True.” Even on the Templar floors there was celebrating, he had to admit. “It's not quite the same as home, though. Merchants come to town and sell all manner of foreign food, the taverns stay open all night, there's dancing in the streets. At midnight the mayor puts on a fireworks show. It's incredible, you would love it. I'll take you, one year.”

The offer was out before he realized what he was saying, and to whom. “I didn't-- I'm sorry, I shouldn't have...”

“It sounds lovely,” she said, her smile small and a little sad. “Perhaps when you're Knight-Commander and I'm First Enchanter.”

Before he could form any sort of response, she leaned and picked up the mortar. Inside, the paste had turned from faint yellow to a deep, earthy brown.

“This should be done,” she said, her voice betraying no hint of emotion. She dipped a finger into the salve, sniffed it, touched it just barely to her tongue. Satisfied, she looked back to Cullen. “I have one more favor to ask of you.”

He cleared his throat, and nodded once. “What do you need?”

“Take your glove off,” she said. “And give me your hand.”

Stripping the steel and leather from his right hand, he laid it in her outstretched palm. With two fingers she scooped a dollop of the salve into his palm, smearing it in a thin layer over his whole hand. He tried not to think too hard about how soft her touch was against his own callused fingers.

“Alright,” she said when she finished. “Now... do you trust me?”

“What is this?” he asked, peering at his sticky hand.

“Hopefully a successful fire retardant,” she said.

“ _Hopefully_?” he repeated, but his protest was lost as her hand holding his was suddenly wreathed in flame.

With a startled yelp he snatched his hand away, instinctively swatting the flame out against his thigh. It only took two pats before he realized the fire had not followed, and now winked out as she closed her fist.

“Did it work?” she asked, reaching for him again, and reluctantly he gave her his arm again. She turned his palm in hers, and grinned. Not even the faintest scorch mark.

“You could have warned me,” he said.

“I'm a healer, you would have been fine,” she replied. “Besides, if I'd told you I was going to set you on fire, would you have let me?”

“Probably not,” he conceded.

“But, it worked this time, so you have nothing to worry about. And you've contributed to the well-being of mages everywhere. This should hopefully cut down the number of burns I heal every day, in the elemental control classes.” she said, chuckling.

He laughed a little as well, but quickly paused. “What do you mean _this time_?”

Job complete, she transferred the salve into an empty jar and stoppered it. Gathering her belongings back into the satchel, soon they were standing to leave.

“Cullen,” she said suddenly, softly, and he turned to face her.

“Yes?”

“Thank you, for your help. Most Templars would have turned me down.” The lantern light softened the angles of her face, turned her eyes from blue to nearly purple.

“I... I mean, just... of course I'd help you,” he said, suddenly struggling to find any words. She was standing very close, and she smelled of earth and flowers. “We're... well, friends?”

“Friends,” she said, repeating the word, testing it. “I'd like that, I think. To be your friend.”   
The first kiss was quick, chaste, the barest brush of her lips against his. Lyanna was so tall she hardly needed to crane her neck to meet him, only take the half step to close the distance between them. Cullen, startled into inaction by her boldness, stood like a statue until she stepped back again, eyes wide and questioning.

The second kiss was nothing like the first. She made a startled sound when he pressed forward, a sound caught and silenced by his mouth on hers. Then her arms were around his neck, his hands fisted in the fabric at her waist, and they were stumbling back against the desk. The satchel clattered from her shoulder to the floor as she sat heavily on the worktop, drawing him with her, her skirts hitching around her knees that he might settle between her legs.

“We can't,” he said, weakly, against her lips, and kissed her a third time. Her fingers were cool against his fevered skin as they slid up the back his neck to tangle in his hair, her breath hot as she kissed the space below his ear.

Cullen wrenched himself away, gasping and staggering backwards until his legs struck the low table, rattling the potted herbs. “We _can't_ ,” he repeated, vehement, forcing his breathing to slow.

The sight of her seated on the workbench, arms still half raised, lips parted and skirt pushed up to show a glimpse of ivory leg... his resolve nearly shattered.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered, drawing her arms back to her chest. “I-i shouldn't have--”

“No,” he said, voice harsh with barely suppressed desire, “I... I never should have come here, it wasn't right.”

She recoiled as if struck, shrinking into herself, pushing down the hem of her robe. “I didn't intend this,” she said, looking away.

“No, I know, I didn't mean....” The words tangled together as they fell from his lips, and he felt every inch of what they were-- teenagers fumbling in the dark. “I'm a _Templar_ ,” he said, feebly. “I took a vow. A _holy_ vow, and if we were caught--”

“I know,” she cut him off, closing her eyes. “Just take me back to the tower.”

As Lyanna stooped to gather the spilled contents of the satchel, Cullen went to the door. He rubbed his hands over his face, back through his hair to hopefully hide how disheveled he had become. When she joined him at the exit, Lyanna had smoothed her hair and straightened her skirts, arranged her features into perfect impassivity.

They parted at the first of the mage floors. Neither had spoken on the impossibly long trip up from the greenhouse, but he felt like he should say something before she vanished up the stairs.

She beat him to it.

“Thank you, Ser Cullen,” she said, without looking at him, and left.

* * *

“Anyone else, I would think they were lying to protect their own dignity,” Varric mused. “But you? I completely believe you would push away a willing maiden in the interest of duty.”

Exhaling slowly, the memory of delicate fingers ghosting the back of his neck, Cullen shook his head. “If we were caught, I'd have been thrown from the tower in disgrace,” he said. “I don't know what they would have done to her, but I imagine it wouldn't have been kind. Kinloch Hold may have been lax in many ways, but dalliances between Templars and mages were taken seriously and punished harshly.”

“No one seemed to notice or care about your midnight meetings in the library, how seriously could anyone have reacted?” the dwarf asked.

“Just because we weren't struck down immediately didn't mean our...” Cullen paused, searching for an appropriately vague word, “ _acquaintance_ went unnoticed. We were foolish to think otherwise.”

“You stayed with the order another ten years, I can't imagine any terrible punishment occurred,” Hawke said.

“It wasn't a punishment so much as... a lesson, I would say. A reinforcement of our roles in the Circle.”

* * *

Lyanna must have found a different route to the infirmary, for she did not pass him in the hallway the next afternoon. Nor did she appear the following day. Whether she returned on the third day he never found out, for he was summoned to the Knight-Commander.

The words _he knows_ repeated over and over in Cullen's mind as he made the descent to the Templar floors. This was the day he was finally punished for his impropriety. The Maker had seen his misstep, and now he would be bounced from the Order for it.

Greagoir's office was austere, a single oaken desk on a plain red rug in the center of a stone room. A single bookshelf stood in one corner, and the only decoration was a painting of Andraste at her pyre on the back wall. Even the desk bore no ornamentation, only an inkwell, an oil lamp, and a well-worn copy of the Chant of Light.

There wasn't even a second chair for visitors to sit in, and so Cullen found himself standing before the stern-faced Knight Commander and doing his best not to fidget in his armor.

“There is to be a Harrowing tonight,” Gregoir said, not bothering to preface the statement with any pleasantries. “You will be the headsman.”

“Yes, ser,” Cullen said stiffly. It was not an unusual order. All Templars took a turn at the Harrowings as the one to strike down the apprentice, should they fail the test and become possessed or worse. “Who is to be Harrowed?”

“Lyanna Amell,” replied the Knight-Commander.

With every fiber of his being, Cullen fought to maintain his composure. And failed, in some imperceptible way, for the Knight-Commander did not dismiss him.

“Better you learn now your place, and theirs, in this tower,” Greagoir said. “Before you make a mistake you cannot come back from.”

“I... yes, ser.”

The Knight-Commander's expression didn't soften, for there was nothing of softness about the man, but it became somewhat less severe. “You are not the first young Templar to have an ill-advised infatuation. Nor by any means will you be the last.”

Every muscle in his body seized, and he stood so still he couldn't even breathe. “Knight-Commander, I can--”

“Do not explain to me and bury yourself further,” Greagoir said, a warning in his words. “Do better. Think on the words of Our Lady Redeemer, and do not allow yourself into this position again.”

“Yes, ser.”

“Go to the Chantry, and ready yourself. Ensure your blade is sharp and your heart is hardened.”

It was as clear of a dismissal as Cullen would get, and he nodded once and turned to leave. When he reached the door, Greagoir spoke again.

“If you attempt to warn her in any way, I will throw you from this tower myself.”

 

She was still in her nightclothes when they lead her into the chamber. Cullen's instructors told him that a key part of the test was its sheer unpredictability, but the only other Harrowing he had attended since his acceptance into the order had been at midday. Bleary-eyed, hair flat on one side from her pillow, it was obvious Lyanna had been sleeping when the Templars arrived.

He could see the exact moment she realized what she had been roused for. She blinked at her surroundings, taking in the half circle of Templars, the font of lyrium in the center of the room. As Irving approached her, she stood straighter, tilted her chin up. Even sleep-mussed, she looked fearless and regal.

Apprentice and First Enchanter exchanged quiet words, but were shortly interrupted by the Knight-Commander. As the trio approached the lyrium, she noticed Cullen standing beside it. His sword was out, the point of it touching the stone floor, his armored hands balanced on the hilt. Lyanna's eyes flicked to the blade, then to his face, and he knew she understood the message sent by his presence.

Without any hesitation, without a final word, Lyanna extended her hand and touched the raw lyrium.

Greagoir caught her as she fell backwards, eyes rolling so far back into her head only the whites were visible. He lowered her gently to the ground, where she lay unearthly quiet. If not for the lack of concern from everyone else in the room, Cullen would have thought her dead.

He did not know how long they all stood watching, only that his eyes burned for fear of blinking, that his fingers were so tight on his sword he thought they might never uncurl. The sky outside the high windows slowly lightened, until sunlight spilled across the floor.

Fear gripped him when she finally moved, fear that the sudden jerk of her hand was the final throes of a mage becoming an abomination. Fear that he wouldn't be able to complete his duties and strike her down. Fear that he would.

But when she settled again, her head lolling to the side and her breath expelling in a peaceful sigh, the tension in the room broke. Irving smiled and preened like a proud father, and Cullen felt the swell of relief in his chest. Lyanna had passed her Harrowing, and earned her place in the Circle.

 

When she found him the next day, well rested and in the gold-trimmed robes of her new station, she had only one question.

“Would you have done it?” she asked.

He was quiet for a long time, vacillating between honesty and simplicity. Finally, he simply replied, “Yes.”

She nodded, a single dip of her chin. “Good.”

 


	8. Chapter 8

“Harsh.”

Cullen frowned. “It was my duty. If she became an abomination, there wouldn't have been time to hesitate. That is part of why they didn't want us to become... emotionally involved. A pause at the critical moment would endanger everyone in the tower.”

“Not you,” Hawke said, waving her hand at him. “The day you neglect your duty is the day nugs fly. _Her._ So ready for her own death.”

“I would imagine being possessed by a demon is unpleasant for the mage inside as well, assuming they live at all,” Cullen said.

Varric and Hawke exchanged a brief, enigmatic glance.

“So then what? Lyanna's a full-bore mage now, I assume that comes with a little freedom. Back to your secret greenhouse trysts?”

Cullen rolled his eyes. “No,” he said. “Greagoir moved my post away from the floor with the infirmary. I imagine Irving adjusted Lyanna's schedule as well. There wasn't much time to worry about it, though.. Rumors of a Blight were filtering up from the south, or some sort of unrest. Cailan summoned the Bannorn to Ostagar. The Grey Warden, Duncan, came to Kinloch Hold not long after. Maybe a week.”

“You didn't see her again? She went off to become a Warden, and that was it? The Harrowing?” Varric pressed. “That's a terrible ending.”

The commander's frown deepened, his eyebrows so furrowed they nearly touched in the center.

“Oh, I saw her again.” 

* * *

The noise of the dining hall, usually a mix of muted conversation punctuated with the clink of silverware, was tonight a cacophony of excited chattering. So far as Cullen could tell from the snatches of information gathered as he passed, there had been some kind of event involving the visiting Grey Warden. Settling into an empty space at one of the long tables, Cullen began to spoon food onto his plate.

“Something happen today?” he asked no one in particular, hoping anyone around him would pause their gossiping and fill him in.

Across from him a ginger-haired Templar, Anna, nearly dropped her fork. “You didn't hear?” she demanded, incredulous. “It's all over the tower.”

“I was in the training yard most of the afternoon,” he said. “Greagoir had me minding initiates.”

“Well you missed one, because she broke into the repository this morning with an Enchanter and an apprentice,” Anna replied. “Made it all the way to the phylactery chamber.”

“ _What_?” It was Cullen's turn to fumble his cutlery. “How was that possible?”

The Circle tower contained a repository that extended several floors below ground. It was full of magical artifacts of unknown or dangerous purpose, and at the very bottom lay the phylactery chamber. Contained within were vials of blood taken from every apprentice in the tower so that they might be tracked in the event of escape. Cullen had never been down there; only Irving, Greagoir, and a very small handful of Senior Enchanters and Knight-Captains ever had reason to venture beneath the tower.

“I don't know,” Anna said, shrugging. “But they destroyed the apprentice's phylactery.”

“Andraste's ashes,” Cullen murmured, but didn't stop eating. It was beef stew day, always a good day in the kitchens.

“That's not even the worst part,” Anna continued, leaning towards Cullen across the table. “The apprentice was a _blood mage_. I heard when they were caught leaving the repository, he sliced his hand open and knocked out everyone in the room and escaped. Even the Knight-Commander couldn't stop him. Abandoned the Initiate he was supposedly in love with.”

That got him to stop chewing. “There's blood mages in the tower? And we're all just sitting here eating peacefully?”

“Apparently just the one,” she said. “Greagoir had the apprentice chambers turned out and couldn't find evidence of any others.”

“Well I suppose that's... reassuring,” he said.

“But there's more!” Anna exclaimed.

He frowned. “More blood mages?”

“No. Well, maybe, who knows. But no, more to the story,” Anna explained, waving her hand at him. “Greagoir sent the initiate to Aeonar for breaking her vows, and he was going to do the same to the Enchanter. Even Irving agreed, and I don't think he's _ever_ willingly sent a harrowed mage to the prison. As she was being hauled off, that Grey Warden turned up. Duncan. He conscripted her into the wardens right then and there, and they just had to let him do it. Some sort of old treaty says that during a Blight, the wardens can just recruit people without any regard for local law.”

“If they're taking accomplices to blood mages, the wardens must be desperate,” Cullen said. “They can keep her, honestly, if that's what she would be doing anyway. Do you know who it was?”

“The apprentice I have no idea, they all sort of blend together before they're Harrowed. But the initiate was Lilly, apparently.”

That wasn't terribly surprising. Lilly was a sweet girl, but had never seemed very dedicated to becoming a Templar. He would have been surprised if she made it all the way through her training anyway. “And the Enchanter?”

“Oh, what's her name,” Anna muttered, tapping her fork against her lips. “I can never remember. The healer.”

Cullen froze. “Wynne?” he asked, though he knew already that was wrong.

She shook her head, squeezed her eyes shut as she tried to remember. “No, no, the other one. Really tall, black hair.”

“Lyanna.” Her name came out in a breathy whisper. “Lyanna Amell.”

“That's it!” Anna crowed, snapping her fingers. “Lyanna! Surprising, too, wasn't she just Harrowed a couple weeks ago? Anyway, Duncan's taking her off to Ostagar...”

The din of the cafeteria faded away, replaced by a distant ringing in his ears. His armor felt like it was tightening around his chest, the steel constricting his breath. He muttered a quick _excuse me_ and stood, leaving a mostly-untouched plate and a stunned Anna in his wake.

  

He wasn't sure how much time passed between his exit from the dining hall and his arrival in his room. It could have been mere minutes, it could have been hours trudging along the tower halls in a daze. Thankfully his bunkmate had a late watch, and Cullen wouldn't have to speak of the day's events with anyone just yet.

With faintly trembling hands he stripped off his gauntlets and bracers, tugged at the straps of his chest plate. All the while his mind raced over every conversation he'd had with her, seeking any hint at what she had apparently been planning. Surely the apprentice in question was Jowan, her oldest friend, who she claimed she would be lost without. Had she been planning to steal a phylactery and abet a blood mage during all of their meetings in the infirmary and the library? Was _she_ a blood mage as well?

Cullen had just shrugged out of his undershirt when there came a knock at his door to interrupt his internal inquisition.

“Yes?” he demanded over his shoulder as the door creaked open. He turned, and stopped when he saw his uninvited guest.

She had her back to him as she gently closed the door and turned the lock. By the rise of her shoulders, she seemed to take a deep breath before facing him. Leaning back against the door, eyes downcast, fingers fidgeting with the end of her long braid, Lyanna spoke in a barely audible whisper.

“I suppose you heard.”

He swallowed once, feeling naked before her in only the close-cut trousers normally hidden by his armor. “Mages aren't allowed in the templar barracks,” he said stiffly.

“I'm not a circle mage anymore,” she retorted, dropping her braid and folding her arms.

“You still shouldn't be here,” Cullen said.

“I know. I know, I just...”

She paused, licked her lips, tucked a stray hair behind her ear. Finally she raised her eyes to meet his. His heart stuttered as he held her gaze. “I wouldn't have helped Jowan if I knew he was a blood mage. I would never have—”

“How long were you planning this?” he asked, afraid of the answer. “Was I a distraction, to throw Greagoir off your scent?”

“No, never!” she said, clearly aggrieved by the thought. “I swear it on the sacred ashes, Lilly and Jowan only came to me yesterday, they already had their plan in place. They only needed me to... acquire certain materials.”

“You just agreed to it?”

“I didn't think it would _work_.”

“And when it did? You kept aiding them, and you destroyed a phylactery. How could you _do_ that?” he demanded. It was some mixture of fear and anger that made him bold. “How could--”

“ _How could I deny them_?” The outburst, punctuated by her clenched fist slamming back against the heavy wooden door, stunned him into silence. “They were going to make him Tranquil, Cullen. Hollow him out, because he's a poor study. I couldn't let that happen, not to him. And...”

She looked away again, her indignation burning away. “He told me he loved her,” she said softly. “How could I deny him, while we...” She gestured between them, words failing her. “What sort of hypocrite would that make me?”

“Lyanna, we never—”

“You promised to take me to Honnleath one day,” she interjected, though not angrily. She seemed defeated, her shoulders sagging. “For Satinalia. Or was that nothing? Empty words?”

“Of course not,” he said. “But we didn't break any rules, Lyanna. We stopped before it went too far. You wouldn't have been a hypocrite. But now there's a blood mage loose in the world with no phylactery to find him.”

“I told you, I _didn't know_ ,” she repeated, adamant. “How could I have? Jowan was such a shit study at everything else, how could I possibly have guessed he mastered a complicated, forbidden school of magic in secret?”

At that, Cullen couldn't help but let out a gallows laugh. The harsh sound of it broke the tension, and Lyanna began to chuckle as well. Together they shared a brief moment of somewhat humorless laughter.

Shaking her head, Lyanna said, “The entire thing is so ridiculous I still half expect to just wake up in my bed. I just want to read and tend my greenhouse, not be a Grey Warden.”

The reality of it settled heavily on Cullen's shoulders. Lyanna would be leaving, and soon, likely never to return to the tower. “When do you go?”

“Tomorrow morning.” She began to fidget with her braid again. “That's... actually why I came to see you.”

Lyanna paused, plucking up the courage to say or do something. The prospect of what that might be made Cullen, once again, acutely aware that he was sorely underdressed.

“Come with us,” she said.

“W-what?” he stammered. An offer to join her was not what he was expecting.

“When we leave in the morning,” she said, taking a step forward. “Come with us to Ostagar.”

“You know I can't,” he replied, his muscles tightening as she took another step towards him.

“Duncan can conscript you, like he did for me,” she explained, drawing even closer. “The Chantry couldn't stop you, not with a Blight in the south.”

“I-i took a vow. A-a holy vow, before Andraste, to serve the Templar order until... until my death. My duty i-is here, to the tower and the order, and...”

“You're rambling,” she murmured. She stood so close he thought he could feel the warmth of her.

“Sorry,” he replied, so quiet he wasn't sure he even spoke aloud.

“Don't apologize,” she said, and placed a slender hand along his jaw. “I knew before I came here you wouldn't say yes.”

“Then why...” The words scraped against his suddenly dry throat. Her thumb brushed over his cheekbone, and he closed his eyes.

“I had to try.” Her fingers slid from his face, tracing down the curve of his neck and collarbone to his chest. She had to feel the way his heart hammered against his ribs, just beneath her touch. “You're a good man, Cullen. I hope you stay that way.”

This kiss was not like those in the greenhouse. This kiss was unhurried, the soft press of her lips against his, full of the promises of another life. He held her face delicately in his hands, and her arms slipped easily around his waist.

This time she separated first, gently extricating herself from their embrace, though he caught her hands.

“I have to go,” she said.

“I know,” he said, squeezed her hands once, released them.

She left without another word. 

* * *

Both Hawke and Varric were silent for a long time, for which Cullen was grateful. He had never shared that memory with another living soul, not even Cassandra. He wasn't even sure why he'd told his current guests. Wine and sheer momentum, if he had to hazard a guess.

Eventually, Varric spoke up. “That,” he said, “Is a much better parting.”

“I can't believe it _was_ a parting,” Hawke said. “I'm genuinely impressed, Knight-Captain. You had an opportunity even the Chantry couldn't deny and you still stuck to your vows. At least no one can ever call you disloyal.”

Cullen snorted, an echo of the humorless laugh he shared with Lyanna so many years earlier. “Staying in the tower is probably the worst decision I made in my entire life. I watched her leave the next morning, you know. I saw her get in the boat and sail away to her new life, and I told myself if she looks back even once, that I would be alright.”

“And?” Varric asked.

The commander shook his head. “Not even a glance. She got in that boat and never came back.”

Varric pursed his lips, considering his options, and chose to press ahead. “She did come back, though, didn't she?”

“I don't want to talk about that,” Cullen said tightly. “You have all the relevant information. Anything that happened when... when she came back, none of it has any bearing on where she might be now.”

“Not even--”

“ _I said no_ ,” he snapped. “You have what you need, Varric. Take it back to the Seeker and leave me in peace, please.”

“ _Her eyes are wrong._ ”

The voice came from above, youthful and quiet.

“ _Her shape is right-- tall, beautiful. Smell of earth and elfroot, dirt under fingernails, the details are right but the eyes are wrong_.”

Cullen's eyes were locked, unseeing, on a mostly empty wineglass. His fists, resting on the desktop, clenched so tightly the leather of his gloves creaked.

“Kid!” Varric hissed at the figure crouched in the entrance to the loft. “Not now!”

“ _Hers are blue, like the sky, like the tower lake on a clear day. But these are violet, lurid, burning and cruel, the wrong eyes in the right face_. _They come again and again, promising life, promising Honnleath at Satinalia, a Denerim wedding, if only they can have a body to possess. But the eyes are wrong!_ ”

“ _Enough_!”

Cullen surged to his feet, tipping his chair over, the knuckles of his right hand striking the desk with such force that everything on it rattled. His breath came in great heaves, the only sound in the now utterly silent room. The outburst halted whatever spirit magic allowed Cole to parse others' memories. In a blink the boy vanished from the shadows at the top of the ladder. He reappeared behind Varric, half incorporeal.

“I just wanted to help,” Cole said softly. “You can't tell the story yourself, I thought I...”

“It's okay, Kid.” Varric reached back to pat a gentle hand on the spirit boy's knee. “Just not now, alright?”

Raking his hands through his hair, Cullen straightened and turned abruptly away, towards the window. He ignored the hushed whispers behind him, blocking out everything in the room but the narrow view through the window. He became dimly aware of an ache in his hand, and when he peeled away his glove he found he'd split all four knuckles. He flexed his fingers, the pain anchoring him.

“I will tell you of the the fall of the Kinloch hold,” he said, without turning to face his guests. He kept his voice carefully neutral as he spoke. “But none of you will say a word until I am done. You will not repeat a single word of this to anyone, besides Cassandra. When I finish, I am done talking about Lyanna Amell and the Ferelden Circle.”

Partially turning towards them, Cullen met each of their gazes in turn. “Do you understand?”

Varric nodded once, all usual levity gone from his expression. “Understood.”

He remained at the window for another long moment, imagining the peaks and valleys of the snow-capped mountains beyond, though they were not visible in the darkness. Then he turned, righted his chair, sat down, and cleared his throat once.

“On Monday morning,” he began, “there were just over two hundred residents living in the tower. By Monday night, more than half of them were dead.”

 

 


	9. Chapter 9

It began in the Enchanters' offices, near the top of the tower. Later investigation uncovered that what began as an ideological disagreement between the Circle leadership escalated beyond reasonable measures. Senior Enchanter Uldred grew angry that Irving—and therefore the rest of the Circle—would not support the traitor Loghain Mac Tir in his attempt to seize the throne of Ferelden. Afterwards, the Senior Enchanter turned to his carefully cultivated personal cabal of blood mages living in the tower. Together, the maleficarum attempted to summon a pride demon, failed, and in the process opened a floodgate directly from the Fade.

Uldred was the first to become an abomination, his body twisted to unrecognition as the demon forced its way in. Many others would follow, some willing hosts but most caught and tortured until they either died or accepted a demon into their bodies.

A wave of demons and maleficarum crashing downward through the tower quickly overwhelmed both the mages and their templar protectors, leaving a sea of blood and death in its wake. A small handful of survivors managed to hole up in the lower floors; those few mages and even fewer Templars the last line of defense to keep the monsters of the tower from spilling into the world.

In order to ensure the safety of those outside, any survivors trapped within were forfeit.

Cullen wasn't even sure how he had been taken, only that one moment he was standing idly at his post, and the next set upon by a shrieking horror of warped flesh and dark magic. He hadn't even drawn his sword when it subdued him, indifferent to his struggling as it dragged him by the neck to the center of the tower. There he was hurled into a prison of hard light with others of his order, some living and some already dead.

At first others were hauled in to join them, two and three at a time. Living mages were forced up the nearby stairs, stumbling and sobbing, into what Cullen realized was the Harrowing Chamber. All too soon the arrival of new prisoners slowed to a trickle, then stopped altogether, and they were left alone with the inhuman noises filtering down from the chamber above.

The anteroom had no windows. There was no way to tell the passage of time, no way to be sure how long they had been trapped. The only source of light was the sickly pink glow of the magical cage that held them. Some of his fellows hurled themselves at the walls, but the transparent cage was as unforgiving as stone. Others knelt and prayed, rocking and mumbling the Chant. A few wept, and still fewer simply stared, hollow-eyed, overwhelmed.

For a time, Cullen was one of the fighters; cursing and slamming his fists against the prison, kicking at it with the sharp point of his armored boot, searching for even the tiniest weakness in the spell. At some point he gave up, sitting down to reserve what energy he still possessed for... whatever was to come. Eventually even the fiercest resistor ceased her raging at the prison walls and sank, defeated, to the stone floor.

That was when the demon came, flanked by abomination.

She was all obscene curves and cruel smiles, the angles of her face a lewd caricature of human beauty. Every inch of her barely-clad body oozed _lust_ , from the sinuous sway of her hips to the caress of her clawed fingers against her own bare breast as she approached.

“I will free you,” she said, slowly, her voice a slick stroke against their very minds. “Give me your bodies, and your suffering will end.”

A single Templar lunged at her when she passed through the prison wall. He was dead before he hit the ground, his life snuffed out with the merest flick of her delicate wrist. She tilted her horned head, her smile a mockery of innocence and charity.

“The next one to raise a hand to me,” she said, casting her violet gaze at each of them in turn, “Will know a fate worse than death. Your fallen brother was the lucky one.”

None resisted after that.

She circled the room, pausing at each huddled Templar and stroking their face or caressing their hair. Each knight she touched went slack, eyes rolling back like the Harrowed mages. She reached Cullen last, slipping a finger beneath his chin and tilting his face towards her.

“ _You_ will be easy, I think,” she said, her tongue sliding against her lower lip. “What delicious thoughts you have, hidden in that golden head.”

His vision narrowed, darkening at the edges until all he knew was the burning amethyst of her eyes.

 oOo 

Golden pre-dawn light spilled across the floor and pooled at the foot of the bed, warming the sheets. He was dimly aware of an arm snaking around his waist, gentle fingers tracing up his bare stomach, stirring his loins. A tender kiss pressed against his shoulder blade, then another at the nape of his neck, and the exploring fingers dipped back towards his hip.

He caught the offending hand in his own, with a not-unappreciative grumble.

“It's early,” he murmured.

A low chuckle came in reply.“I know.”

The hand freed itself from his grip and returned to the exposed flesh of his abdomen, tracing lazy circles and raising gooseflesh in its wake. Cullen groaned as the touch slipped beneath the waistband of his pants, through the fine thatch of hair and lower still.

“Careful, wife,” he said, voice a rumble low in his chest.

Lyanna laughed again, her breath a whisper against the hair at the nape of his neck. She ran a single fingertip delicately along the length of him and then back upwards, eliciting another needy sound. She repeated the motion once, twice, but before she could complete the third he spun, pinning her to the mattress.

Her gasp was equal parts surprised and pleased as he kissed her, her hands gliding up his spine and pulling him close. He grinned into her lips, amazed that after all these years she still could drown him in desire with the merest touch.

A patter of feet in the hallway interrupted them just as he managed to undo the laces of his underclothes.

“Not early enough, it seems,” Lyanna sighed. Cullen slid reluctantly away from her, turning to sit up just as a pair of little bodies launched themselves onto the bed.

“Mama!” cried one of them, as they each scrambled across the sheets. A boy, with dark hair and his father's broad build, and a ruddy-blonde girl with her mother's bright eyes.

“Good morning, my loves,” Lyanna laughed, gathering their children into her arms. She looked to him over the little girl's head, and Cullen's blood ran cold.

Violet eyes, slitted like a cat's, set in his wife's narrow face.

“What a perfect life,” she purred. “Please don't ever leave me, Cullen.”

 oOo

The demon was once again outside the prison wall when he jerked awake. She watched her hostages with a distant amusement.

“I'm impressed,” she said, drawing a finger wantonly across her full lips. “Only three dead. And none of you took my offers.”

All around the purple cage the other Templars were shaking themselves awake. Several of them immediately vomited up the meager contents of their stomachs. Most merely looked around in a daze, still half trapped in their visions. Three, as she said, were simply dead. The demon turned and left, with a wicked laugh that hung in the air long after her departure.

She returned at irregular intervals. Sometimes she brought her abominations, and sometimes she was accompanied by a handful of sneering blood mages. They laughed and taunted each time the surviving Templars were subjected to new hallucinations of their deepest desires. For Cullen, every vision involved Lyanna Amell. Sometimes they met for late-night trysts in the library or storage closets; once he was Knight-Commander and she was First Enchanter, and he took her against the desk in his office. Yet the visions were as often mundane as they were sensual. He watched her tend a garden outside their small cottage; they shared a quiet breakfast in a sun-drenched Denerim apartment; she danced with him at Satinalia. And every vision ended the same: those terrible violet cat's eyes, gleaming in Lyanna's lovely face.

With each visit, as none of the Templars took her offers, the desire demon grew petulant. She began to execute one of them every time she appeared, in increasingly horrifying ways. The first few were fortunate and merely had their throats slit by maleficarum. After that she personally punched through their armor and tore out their still-beating hearts, and then moved on to immolating them alive.

Eventually, after hours, or days, or maybe only minutes, Cullen was the final survivor. The demon hauled him up by the throat, slamming him backwards against the wall, pressing her face so close to his that their lips touched as she spoke.

“I will break you,” she said, the fingers of her free hand combing softly through his hair. “I will make you beg for release. When we are done, you will _crave_ one of my brethren to enter your body, to--”

She jerked her head around, looking over his shoulder, her lips turning downward in a pout. “Intruders,” she muttered, and returned her attention to her captive. She dragged a forked tongue along his jaw, bit at the lobe of his ear, and whispered, “I will be back for you, darling.”

In a blink she was outside the cage, stalking away, her pet abominations at her heels. Cullen crumpled to the ground, back still pressed against the hard-light wall, but didn't move otherwise. Certainly it was a trick. She was lying in wait, ready to pounce at a moment's notice. He didn't think he would be able to resist her again.

Seconds passed, then minutes, and she did not reappear.

He did the only thing he could think; he turned around, away from the corpses of his friends and colleagues. Kneeling on the ground, bending as far as he could until his forehead nearly touched his knees, Cullen folded his arms over his head and wept.

Through wracking sobs he recited as much of the Chant as he could remember. He repeated his Templar vows. He begged Andraste, the Maker, whoever would listen, to free him, to lower the walls or kill him. Whatever it took to escape the tower, he didn't care.

A nearby crash startled him, and he looked up to find the door had been kicked in by a qunari. The massive figure was followed by a boyish ginger templar, a dark-skinned elf with a tattooed face, Senior Enchanter Wynne, and... Lyanna. She gasped when she saw him, clapping a hand over her mouth.

“Maker, no,” he hissed. Another vision, this one the cruelest of all: Lyanna come to rescue him. He shoved to his feet, determined to go down fighting. He would not let the demon win, he would rather die. He would not be the only one to fail.

“I know what you are!” he railed, slamming his gauntleted fists against the glowing wall.

“Cullen, what have they done to you?” Lyanna—no, not Lyanna—asked as she approached. “Do you recognize me?”

“Only too well.” He groaned, sagging, too tired to maintain his rage. “How far they must have delved into my thoughts...”

He went to his knees again, clasping his hands and pressing his folded knuckles tightly against his forehead.

“The boy is exhausted,” Wynne said. “And this cage... I've never seen anything like it.”

“We have to get him out of here,” Lyanna replied. She knelt, placing her palms flat against the cage. “Do you hear me, Cullen? We're going to free you.”

“I know this trick,” he said, determination beginning to fail him. “You won't break me like you broke the others. I will... I will stay strong, for my sake, and for theirs.”

Squeezing his eyes shut, a disjointed verse of the Chant falling from his lips, he willed himself awake once again. Yet when he raised his head again, Lyanna was still there, crouched just outside the prison.

“Oh, Cullen,” she whispered.

A jagged laugh burst out of him. “It's... it's really you.”

What finally broke him was the realization that she had truly come for him. Lyanna was here, but she was too late. All of the others were dead, and that he should live to see her again was some sort of ultimate cruel trick.

“Why did you come back to the tower?” he asked, weakly. His hands fell away from his face, and he stared unseeing at the stone floor.

“I came to seek help to retake the throne of Ferelden. I had no idea that... that all _this_ had happened,” she said, unable to find a word to encompass the horror. “I only wish I had come sooner.”

“You couldn't have stopped it. No one could have. This tower is lost, Lyanna,” he said darkly. “Leave now, before you're lost too.”

“I can't,” she said. “Greagoir will only let us out again if we bring back Irving. Do you know if he's alive?”

“They took him into the Harrowing chamber. They took all the mages in there..” his voice quavered again, and he took a shuddering breath. He could feel himself growing hysterical. “I don't think he lived, I don't think any of them lived. The noises in that room... You can't go in there, Lyanna!”

“Hush, love,” she murmured, as though soothing a spooked horse. She looked over her shoulder, exchanged words with her companions. When she turned back her jaw was set, her expression determined.

“I have to leave you here,” she said gently. “Our only chance is to rescue Irving. But I promise I'll come back for you. I promise.”

They disappeared into the Harrowing chamber. He didn't know how long they were gone, only that the tortured screaming turned into the sounds of battle. Eventually those sounds went quiet as well, steeping the tower in a deafening silence. Then the glowing prison winked out, bathing the room in near-complete darkness but for faint torchlight spilling through the shattered doorway.

He didn't wait for Lyanna to come back. As soon as the walls dropped, he sprinted from the room. Anger began to well in his chest as he ran down through the tower, past even more bodies, blood splattering every wall. Rage fueled his descent, blinding and all-consuming, until he was pounding his fists on the locked door to the entryway. Once Greagoir let him through, Cullen's exhaustion burned away beneath the heat of his fury. He paced the entrance hall like a caged animal, shrugging off the Chantry sister that urged him to sit and rest.

 _Mages did this_. He repeated it to himself like a mantra. _Mages did this. Mages did this. Mages did this._

Mages had turned on their own, had brought such evil into the world. They put on friendly faces and pretended to live by the rules of the tower, and in secret they plotted a slaughter. How could you trust anything with that sort of power at its fingertips? The very power of life and death?

So lost in his own growing spiral of hatred that he barely noticed Lyanna's return. Blood-splattered and battle worn, she and her companions all returned alive. With the First Enchanter and a handful of surviving mages, no less. He ignored them all, until he caught a piece of her conversation with the Knight-Commander.

“You told me that if I brought you Irving, you would not annul the Circle,” she was saying, a new, hard edge to her voice. “Well, here he is.”

“If Irving believes the maleficarum are all dead, then I supposed I have to trust him,” Greagoir replied.

“The Warden and her companions did an admirable job,” Irving said. “Yes, Greagoir, I believe she has succeeded where we failed.”

Greagoir gave a curt nod. “Very well,” he said. “The Circle stands, what little is left of it.”

“No!” Cullen cried, the outburst drawing their immediate attention. Lyanna's expression was pained as he approached.

“Do you have something to say, Templar?” Greagoir asked, a warning in his tone.

“How can you trust them?” Cullen demanded, pushing past the unfamiliar templar at Lyanna's side. “How can you know Irving isn't a blood mage? How can you know they aren't _all_ blood mages? They hid it so well, he could be _lying!_ ”

“That's enough,” Greagoir warned.

“You weren't in there you don't know what... what they did,” he pleaded. “You have to annul the Circle, it's the only way to be sure.”

“I've made my decision,” the Knight-Commander said. “I'm sorry if you disagree, but I've known the First Enchanter since before you could walk, son. He is no blood mage.”

“You're making a mistake!”

“Go sit down.” Greagoir's tone suggested he would brook no argument.

With a wordless growl of impotent rage Cullen turned and stalked away. He found a bench in the shadow of the staircase, hidden from veiw as far from the Knight-Commander and Lyanna as he could get in the cramped room. Sitting heavily, he dropped his head into his hands as fatigue swept back over him.

He may have dozed, or his brain may have simply turned off for a moment, unable to process anything new; a soft touch at his knee startled him into the present.

“I'm sorry,” Lyanna said quietly, pulling her hand away. She was standing before him, bent at the waist, and when he raised his head to look at her she crouched in front of him. “I didn't mean to startle you.”

“It's fine,” he muttered by rote.

“It's not,” she replied. She looked so different in her Warden armor, a smear of dirt or blood on her neck. Stripping off her gloves, she tentatively reached towards him again. “You're bleeding. May I?”

Cullen only managed the barest of nods, and closed his eyes. Her hands had calluses of their own, now, but they were still feather-light against his skin as her fingers rested on either side of his neck.

“I don't know what they did to you,” she said, as the faintest whisper of magic traveled down her fingertips. Muscles in his neck and shoulders, held taut for days, began to uncoil at the warmth of her touch. “But I hope I can heal some of it. Any of it.”

He sagged into her hands, nearly falling off the bench.

“You don't have to stay here,” she said, one hand sliding up to cup his cheek. “Greagoir surely wouldn't force you stay after what happened. You could come with us.”

When he didn't reply, she said, “Please, Cullen. Don't stay in this... this charnel house. Come with me.”

He opened his eyes, wanting to say yes, but something stopped him. This was real, he knew it was real, the visions _never_ lasted this long, and yet... and yet...

Her eyes were violet.

“Unhand me, maleficar!” he snarled, his fist closing around her wrist. He surged to his feet, jerking her with him. Instinctively he reached out with his mind, found the thread of her magic, and severed it.

The air went out of her and she stumbled backwards out of his grip, gasping, clutching at her chest and the emptiness where her power had been. He advanced, and she scrambled backwards, fear in her...

In her _blue_ eyes. It had been a trick of the torchlight, the shadow of the staircase, a mistake.

Stars exploded before his eyes as a gauntleted fist struck his jaw, sent him sprawling. The ginger Templar, boyish face contorted in rage, stood over Cullen.

“Do not touch her!” the Templar snarled.

“ _Alistair_ ,” Lyanna said sharply. She was pushing to her feet, and the Templar, Alistair, rushed to her side. He took her face in his hands, concern replacing the righteous anger.

“Are you alright? Did he hurt you?” The man's big hands were tender on her cheeks, and he stood too close to her.

From his place on the floor, rubbing his aching jaw, Cullen was ashamed to find jealousy pooling in his stomach.

“No,” she said, waving him away. She looked down at Cullen, sadness and... and _pity_ in the downward tilt of her lips, the furrow of her brow. “I'm fine, he just... he isn't in his right mind.”

“Lyanna--”

“You should leave the tower, Cullen,” she said, and paused, steadying herself. Her expression hardened. “But I think... I think maybe it should not be with me. Take care of yourself.”

* * *

“ _That_ ,” Cullen said slowly, “was the last time I saw her. The rest, everything she did as Hero of Ferelden, you know.”

In the aftermath of the tale, the room was very still. At some point Cole had fully materialized and perched in the front windowsill. Even Hawke couldn't quite bring herself to needle the Commander about being punched in the face by the future King of Ferelden. To his own surprise, Cullen found he felt... lighter, somehow. Eventually Varric nodded once, and stood.

“Thank you, Commander,” he said, inclining his head in acknowledgment. “I know that wasn't easy for you.”

“No,” Cullen agreed, “It wasn't. But, if I'm being honest, it was... cathartic.”

“Well, in that case, glad we could be of some service to you,” the dwarf chuckled. “We'll leave you to it, then.”

They bid their goodnights, Cullen following the trio to the door so that he might shut at lock it. Cole paused before leaving, turning and pointing a long finger towards the ceiling.

“You have a very large hole in your roof.”

Cullen sighed, but couldn't quite muster up any annoyance. “Yes, Cole. Thank you.”

 

That night, for the first time in years, he dreamed of her. Not, as had so often been the case before, the nightmarish caricature of her conjured up by a lust demon from his basest desires to torment him. When he woke it was not in a panic, covered in an icy film of sweat, the feel of taloned hands still on his spine.

Alone in his bed, he could recall only a few fading, not-unpleasant images. Dark hair against the pale curve of her neck, the ink and old-paper smell of the libraries. Greenhouse soil under her fingernails, a breathy laugh in his ear. Enough time had passed, he realized later, that he didn't even try to cling to those memories as they bled back into his subconscious. He merely stepped into the chill of the mountain morning and dressed.

 

-Epilogue-

Early spring thaws had finally cleared the road to Haven. Still, it took her nearly a week to pick a path up the mountain, winding through fallen trees and boulders. The first time she'd made the journey, nearly twelve years prior, it had taken just short of six hours. It was nothing short of a minor miracle that her horse hadn't rolled an ankle, or that her old dog hadn't simply lay down and given up on the treacherous journey.

Finally she arrived at the ruins of the village proper. Swinging down out of her saddle, she led her mount through the half-collapsed front gate. Her dog, sprightly as ever, bounded ahead to sniff through the burnt-out shells of nearby homes. If that dog came back with yet another pair of greying, moist pantaloons, she would... well, she didn't know what she would do.

Leaving the horse at a sparse patch of grass poking through the snow, she progressed through the village towards what would have been the central square, and the newly-built, now likely crushed, Chantry. She wasn't sure _what_ she expected to find within, if anything at all, but it seemed her best bet to find her way to the Inquisition.

She stopped cold at the edge of the square, startled. What she absolutely did _not_ expect to find was a handful of soldiers clearing away debris and attempting to erect a statue. Their armor bore the eye-and-dagger insignia of the Inquisition.

“Well that's fortuitous,” she muttered wryly to herself. She meant to call to the men when the dog streaked past, barking up a storm. The Inquisition soldiers instantly dropped what they were doing and drew their weapons.

“Hamhock!” she snapped, charging after the dog. “Get back here!”

The dog skidded to a stop, but didn't return. Thirteen years old, and the beast still couldn't listen worth shit.

“Sorry, sorry,” she said hastily, trotting up next to the dog. Pushing her hood back, she smiled at the soldiers, still bristling with weaponry. “No manners, this one. Say, I don't suppose you fine young men could direct me to the Inquisition?”

The assembled soldiers stared for a moment, then one of them nodded. “Sure, ma'am, they've moved on to Skyhold.”

She pursed her lips, then held up a finger. “Hold on, just a moment, please,” she said, and turned to leave. Shortly she returned, leading the horse, a folded parchment in her hand which she offered to the men. “Could you show me on this map?”

Soon, a location marked and her course set, she rode back the way she had come.

“The Commander's going to tan your hide, just giving out information like that,” said one of the soldiers. “You know the Inquisitor is off hunting Grey Wardens in the Approach.”

“Are you kidding? Do you have any idea who that was?” demanded the one who had marked the map.

“Some Warden? Probably a spy,” said the first.

“No, you dolt, _that was the Hero of Ferelden._ ”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> credit to the bioware writers for a few lines of dialogue from the scene where the warden finds cullen in the demon trap. 
> 
> and thank you SO much to everyone who commented and kudos'd and followed and favorited :) i appreciate all your feedback. stay tuned for the exciting sequel!


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